Web Design Christchurch, New Zealand

What is Wordpress?

WordPress is the most popular web blogging software package that works exceptionally well as a content management system (CMS). Anyone can set up, manage and maintain a Wordpress blog or website.

What makes Wordpress the most popular web blogging software?

It is Open Source. This means it is free to install, use and distribute Wordpress on your site. Since it’s open source it also has a thriving community of developers constantly improving the software and creating plugins to expand the software.

Ease of use. WordPress is suitable for just about anybody – from the absolute novice to the advanced programmer. It lets lets you create pages and posts to build out the content of your site. You can also easily manage your site’s look and feel with themes. These are custom designs for your site that control how everything is laid out and organised.

Feature-rich interface. WordPress has a rich text editor with advanced multimedia support. This means you can upload images and flash movies via the editor so that they show up on your site in no time.

Expandable. WordPress’s community distributes a large number of modules for almost any popular website feature. The software is highly customisable, so you can use it for just about anything.

Optimised Search Engine Results. There is a number of quality plugins that are programmed specially for Wordpress software or websites – they makes it easier to optimise your search engine results. This means your site is more likely to land on the first page of Google results, which means people are more likely to find you.

An e-Commerce website is simply any website that sells something online for payment, it is anything from an online bookstore to a simple web page selling products or services. The range of e-Commerce solutions available are numerous and its hard to get a truly objective view of each of the solutions or products, especially when each introduces itself as one of the most secure and versatile shopping cart solutions to date.

Of course an e-Commerce website can be built from scratch and be completely customised to the clients needs, and sometimes this is the only way to do the job. It applies to those of you who really need something that is ‘outside the square’ and has business logic and ordering processes not often found in the off the shelf solutions. Be aware that the costs of building such a website can be considerably higher than any other web project just because of the custom security modules that will need to be coded to cope with the e-Commerce system.

The much simpler (and therefore cheaper) route to take is to customise an existing and well known e-commerce solution. With the variety of open source and ‘off the shelf’ solutions available its not often hard to find something that is a close match to your needs and then make small adjustments from there.

Some questions you should be asking yourself before proceeding with any e-Commerce website:

Do I accept local or international customes (or both) and what currency should I accept payments in?
Will I need to accept credit card payments online?
Who will maintain the online store and upload new products?
Do I have a limit on the products I can sell?

Hope this has been some useful information for you when it comes to considering having an e-Commerce website.