With over nine years of commercial web development experience behind him, Ali Qamar is a highly experienced and evolved web developer and has been a part of our busy Clock digital team for nearly three years.
With excellent analytical and problem solving skills, he plays a key role in creating technically solid solutions for our diverse client base on a daily basis. We sat down with him earlier in the week to discuss all things WordPress and the direction it’s likely to take in the future.
Why does WordPress continue to be so popular?
WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, free and open source publishing system. Its roots and development history date back to 2001. Since this time, WordPress has taken the internet by storm and has evolved into a fully featured, stable, solid and very flexible CMS, powering almost 26% of all websites.
Download figures are impressive as well and when I last checked I think it was slightly over the 20 million mark so it’s certainly appealing to vast amounts of people. It’s used by the likes of New York Times, CNN and Forbes and because it’s so versatile people can use it to create many different types of websites ranging from content rich ones to e-commerce stores, wiki pages and brochure sites.
On top of this, WordPress offers numerous excellent features as well as being flexible and cost effective. With no license fees to pay, ease of use, frequent releases, and a vibrant community, it’s no surprise that WordPress is growing even more popular.
What would you say to people who claim that because WordPress is free they shouldn’t have to pay for additional functions?
WordPress is open-source which means the source code of the CMS can be changed and distributed without incurring any license costs. However, just because you can download and install WordPress an organisation should still invest extra time and resources into tailoring it to their needs and customer requirements.
When we build a WordPress website for a business, we take care of everything for them and build a site around their unique requirements. We have a vigorous process of gathering and analysing client requirements and turning them into functional aspects. Free WordPress CMS core is just a foundation and the basic framework allowing us to base a project on. Creating an aesthetically pleasing, user centered, fully bespoke solution involves careful execution and planning and the reassurance that the produced work is solid, stable, future proof, scalable and meets all the client requirements.
“WordPress offers numerous excellent features as well as being flexible and cost effective”
What is WordPress like from a scalability and content point of view?
WordPress.com runs on WordPress with millions of posts created each month. However, scalability also depends on other factors such as the hosting environment and architecture and caching mechanism, to name just a few. Many big and enterprise level media sites with heavy traffic employ WordPress because it scales well and there are techniques and plugins that they can use to improve the scalability.
Can you talk about some of the features that are available to people that maybe they weren’t aware of?
WordPress frequently releases new updates; in fact they have released 29 major versions so far with 4.4 being the latest*. Over time some very useful and extremely cool features have been introduced.
For example, you can paste a tweet link when writing a post and it will be automatically embedded into the post. The same is true for YouTube embeds.
WordPress also introduced a distraction free writing mode which can be helpful if you want a clean and minimal interface when writing. WordPress media library has some excellent enhancements as well and it’s now possible to edit images, crop, resize or rotate right within the media library. And these are just some of the more basic plus points.
How important is WordPress and SEO and are they linked?
SEO is massively important with regards to getting better organic search positions in search engines. WordPress is pretty well optimised in that respect and is actually considered one of the best CMS systems out there for SEO purposes. By combining the native features of WordPress with one of the leading SEO plugins called ‘Yoast SEO’, it is possible to achieve impressive search engine rankings relatively quickly. By using the ‘Yoast SEO’ and WordPress you can get a well optimised site up and running pretty soon. Don’t forget that the WordPress comments system, which is also a native feature, is really helpful from an engagement and SEO perspective.
“SEO is massively important with regards to getting better organic search positions in search engines”
Do you have a WordPress prediction or piece of advice for the next 12 months?
By looking at the number of WordPress downloads and a huge and ever passionate community of developers behind it, we can confidently say the future of WordPress is looking very promising and bright.
WordPress considers customisation as one of the biggest opportunities for improving its experience. For this reason, will see WordPress getting even better at front-end live editing and content design in the near future. To sum it up we see the future of WordPress in better social integration, more mobile friendliness and overall evolution as an application platform.
*At the time of writing .
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