Wordpress websites for freelancers - Copywriter Collective

WordPress websites are taking over. Good news for most freelancers, except web designers of course. Now anyone can design and edit their own website without paying thousands to the designer for the initial website, and then extra every time they need it changing. The Collective of Copywriters and creatives offers some advice to freelancers looking for a simpler website option.

WordPress used to be purely a blogging platform, but some bright spark came up with the idea of website ‘skins’ that you put over the top, metaphorically speaking.

A skin (or theme) supercharges your blog – giving it multiple pages with all the look and functionality of a website, but with the easy content management system underneath.

Themes are designed by professional web-designers and sold off-the-peg for around $45, with a customisable option for an extra fee. So it’s not all bad news for web-designers. There’s just a new content management system and still lots of room for design if people are willing to pay for it.

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Get started, with a little help

You don’t have to learn programming to set up your own WordPress website but it’s still quite complicated, particularly if you want one that looks good. For that reason we recommend hiring wordpress professionals, such as Dutch Duo a two man operation run by Raoul Boot and Erik Spek.

For considerably less than the price of a normal website they can give you a WordPress site that you can manage and update yourself.

The benefits of WordPress

Once you’re up and running the primary benefit is the ease-of-use. Do you have a special event coming up? Make a new page for it in a matter of hours. Want to change your portfolio? Upload and change the order yourself. New blog posts? Add them straight onto the site.

What about disadvantages? If you’re a designer you might turn your nose up at the appearance. Even a nice design still looks like a WordPress site because the layout is a little restrictive. If you’ve seen a few WordPress sites you can identify another straightaway. But that also gives users predictability and surely your website is to showcase your portfolio and not.

SEO perfection

The other major advantage is how Google friendly it is. WordPress is optimised for search engines and all the behind-the-scenes stuff is already perfect. No more Flash websites that Apple can’t show and Google can’t find.

You can add various plugins easily to boost it even more, such as a sitemap which Google loves. And it also loves website that keep changing and getting new contact, which will happen a lot more when you work with WordPress.

WordPress is still evolving but the good thing is that it will evolve around you. The multi-language option, which is offered by some difficult and expensive plugins now, will be easier soon as more and more developers and companies start working on the platform. WordPress is making the web for everyone again.

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