What does your Home, Car, Body and Website have in common?
The quick answer is, just like having a home built with quality materials and to the highest standards, a well coded WordPress powered website tends to be the best option for 99% of people needing a professional site. On the flip side, a home built with low quality materials and not conforming to strict building standards will cause major headaches and a poorly coded website NOT powered by WordPress tends to be a nightmare for website owners.
Now for the more detailed comparison.
Dream Home or Nightmare in Disguise?
Imagine you are looking to buy a home for you and your family. You have your finances in order. You start to look at a home and it looks great. Fresh coat of paint, stainless steel kitchen and marble floors. The price is extremely affordable at a price point that makes you feel like you need to buy it now before someone else scoops it up.
The problem is, in your excitement you failed to get the home inspected. After closing on the gorgious home for your family you discover the truth. Bed Bugs, busted boiler, cracked foundation, messed up roof, old electrical wiring. NOOOOOOOOO
The Takeaway? Inspect That House!
Dream Car or Lemon
The car that you buy is an important decision. You have plenty of places to buy a car from like Craigslist to the local dealership. Let’s say you decide to try and save a few dollars and get your car from the classified ads in the back of the paper. Let’s also assume you aren’t a mechanic. You see a decent car for a great price and relatively low miles. You buy it all cash from a person you will most likely never see again. You drive off and for the first day it seems fine. But then you notice something, “Why aren’t the miles on the odometer changing”? You take it to your local mechanic and after they inspect it, the truth comes out. You thought the car had 50,000 miles, try 250,000, the original owner stopped the odometer. Also, the engine and transmission are reconditioned after market parts and won’t last longer than a month or so. So now instead of saving a few dollars, you’ve spent more than what a good car would cost from a local dealership.
The Takeaway? Get the CarFax!
Health Nut or Dead Man Walking?
Don’t you hate looking at magazines and seeing some of those models. Why don’t I look like that? How do they look so great. Say thanks to fancy photography and photoshop! The Sad truth is you often hear the story. That model barely ate, abused drugs in order to get that body, or underwent so many surgeries that they are now deformed.
The Takeaway? Looks can be deceiving!
Cheap Website or Quality Website
You are in the type of business that makes having a website vital to your financial success. Your current and future customers are online and you need to be found by them when they search Google. So you decide to get a Website. You see an advertisement for a cheap website with all the bells and whistles. You say to yourself “Hey, looks good enough”! Nothing to worry about right? Wrong!
Option 1
Renting a Website vs Owning your Website. If you rent your site from a service provider you never benefit from the websites increase in value. You didn’t know websites gain value? Well they can if done properly. Unfortunately you don’t get the benefit of that added monetary value if you rent your website.
Option 2
You hire someone for the lowest possible price just to save a few bucks. They give you a decent looking website but if you aren’t a Web Developer, then you most likely haven’t looked under the hood. Your site might be poorly coded or even worse, full of malware.
The Best Option!
Host your website with a reputible Web Hosting Provider, Get a good Domain Name and get your website developed by a Web Developer that shows you your Website Validation from a third party service. The two services I use are some of the best. W3C Validator and PingDom Tools.
WordPress
Make sure your website is built using WordPress which is the Premier Open Source Content Management System which puts the power in the hands of website owners. Did you know that WordPress powers over 20% of websites currently online? The software is used by everyday bloggers to Fortune 500 Companies. It can be as simple or as complex as you need it to be.
Examples of BAD Websites Validation Results
Notice the Load time in the first picture and the low grade. In the second picture you will notice the over 200 plus errors and warnings.
Note I blanked out the sites as to not bring negative attention directly to them.
Now an Example of my website using WordPress and my Custom Theme
Notice in the first picture my site gets a near perfect grade of 95 out of 100 and in the second picture there are only 7 errors and or warnings.
I haven’t come across a perfectly coded website. But I have come across many that are poorly coded and eventually end up breaking because of the poor coding used to create the site.
The Takeaway? Get a Professional to help you with your website, then validate it!
By doing it right from the begining, you save yourself a world of headache later. Remember, your website is an extension of you. Make sure it sends the right message! I hope you find this article useful.
PS: View some Demo Themes