WordPress is an open-source content management system (CMS). Originally created in 2003 as a blog publishing tool, WordPress has become so much more in the last couple of years. It is now a viable option for website developers looking to implement it as a CMS in their customer’s websites.

1. Excellent User Interface

The user interface of WordPress has been designed to make publishing and maintaining the content on your website an easy task. While it may not be as robust as other CMS solutions (ex: Expression Engine, Drupal), it does include the major features that everyday users need, without making the management of your website too difficult.

2. Plenty of Plug-ins are Available

One of the biggest benefits of WordPress is the available library of plug-ins. Plug-ins are software components that can be added to your WordPress installation to perform a specific task or function. This could be something as simple as improving the sort order of posts to a complete site-wide search engine optimization (SEO) tool. Although there are no guarantees offered by these plug-ins, they are generally free (or priced very low). This allows you to rapidly add functionality to your website, without the time-consuming effort of developing the code from scratch.

3. Excellent Themes for Download

A WordPress theme is basically a “skin” that is overlaid over top of the WordPress system and controls how the website looks. As the WordPress theme engine has evolved, so have the themes that are available for download. There are many companies that now specialize in the design and development of high quality WordPress specific themes. Most themes sell from about $50 – $100 and come with many of the most commonly wanted features including content sliders, an options panel, and social media feed integration.

4. It is FREE

WordPress itself is free (as in it doesn’t cost a thing). You will need a web hosting account however, but other than that, the software won’t cost you anything. Even for a modest budget of $100 though, you can be up and running within a day using a professionally designed theme and some popular plug-ins.

5. Community Support

While WordPress is a great platform to use and build upon, it is not without its flaws. As with any software of this complexity, there are bugs and compatibility issues. More often than not, it is due to plug-ins that haven’t been updated. So what do you do when you need help and can’t get support for this free product? You can search online and find many community forums and websites that provide information, solutions, and discussions on all aspects of WordPress. With an install base of approximately 5 million websites, there are many other webmasters who have run into the same issues that you may be having and are willing to provide you with the assistance that you need.

If you are in the process of building (or re-building) a website, take a look at WordPress as a basis for your content management system. It is an excellent, affordable option for those looking to have some control over the content that they publish on their website.

Have you ever wondered what do web outsourcing enterprises do? What is outsourcing in the first place? Here is what Wikipedia has to say:

“The term outsourcing is used inconsistently but usually involves the contracting out of a business function – commonly one previously performed in-house – to an external provider…the preferential contract rates…can be obtained by temporarily employing experts in specific areas to deliver elements of a project…”

So, to make it clear at the very beginning, nowadays enterprises temporarily employ experts belonging to other enterprises in order to cut expenses, get a larger degree of expertise for a specific part of a specific project or to get help in times when they are up to their noses in work.

Currently, outsourcing exists in many forms. Organizations hire service providers to handle tasks of less importance, but some organizations outsource whole projects. The most common forms of outsourcing are information technology outsourcing (ITO) and business process outsourcing (BPO).

BPO comprises human resources outsourcing (HRO), call center outsourcing, finance and accounting outsourcing, and claims processing outsourcing. Dominant outsourcing service providers include some of the famous firms like IBM, HP, ACS and Accenture. These outsourcing deals involve long-lasting contracts that can be worth millions of dollars.

Some of the smaller companies that are short on time and money use outsourcing in order to finish projects before the deadline. They hire outsourcing service providers to finish a new project almost completely, from product design to marketing and sales.

Outsourcing usually consists of four stages:

- determining the strategy of the company considering outsourcing,

- determining which projects are to be outsourced, to which countries and to which service providers

- agreement development, to work out the legal and pricing terms, and

- outsourcing management that improves the communication between the client and the service provider.

It is a good thing both for the company that gives project tasks and the company that receives them. The company receiving project tasks is usually smaller, and this way it can reach the clients more easily. On the other hand, the company contracting out a business project gets all the necessary help at a favourable price.

Now, when it comes to web development, outsourcing usually involves the completion of projects by one company for another company. Here, in my native country Serbia, this practice is developing gradually. Web design, web development and web outsourcing have become very popular over the past few years. We have a number of high quality web development and design enterprises in Serbia, much of which do outsourcing and complete different parts of web development projects for other companies, often from abroad.

An example of the abovementioned practice:

If a company has a web site to develop and some parts of it need be done using Ajax, and the company has no Ajax experts, it will search for other companies, often abroad, that are willing to lend the work of their Ajax experts at a reasonable price to the company in question.

Considering that the term outsourcing is vague and used slightly differently in different contexts, bear in mind that this is only one of the possible ways of interpreting this phenomenon that usually varies slightly from one situation to the next.

Hopefully, this article has revealed you another secret of the web design and development world. Well, maybe not a secret, but definitely something not everyone is familiar with, and in today’s society it is favourable to know a bit about anything and everything.