Look into some of the success stories of a few Wordpress Digital Agencies and you will notice a striking similarity between them.
The founders initially begin with freelance designing or developing works, building websites while simultaneously running their small businesses. As soon as they realize they are missing out on bigger opportunities, they take the next step forward, i.e., to start a Digital Agency.
You may or may not be familiar but this is precisely how ColorWhistle’s founder started out. Sankar’s passion for web designing and online marketing urged him to make his freelance gig more scalable and sustainable. And that’s also the stage where many WordPress freelancers and small business owners get to at some point in time.
If you find yourself in a similar position where you’re feeling okay with the work you do but don’t feel as though you’re maximizing your impact or your profit, scroll down further.
In this blog, we’ll showcase new opportunities in bringing about the online business revolution using WordPress. Furthermore, we’ll be discussing the future roadmap of WordPress and look at how partnership with a fellow WordPress Digital Agency is scalable.
WordPress Agency - The Base Structure Of Online Business Growth
WordPress is the first open-source CMS that was developed and thus gained a beginner’s advantage. With the likes of BBC America, Sony Music, Mercedes-Benz, TechCrunch, PlayStation Blogs to small business owners, everyone uses WordPress to get their business online!
“But WordPress is not only for blogging – nearly 28% of all e-commerce goes through WooCommerce.”
Automattic, the parent company of WordPress acquired WooCommerce in 2015.
WordPress Ecosystem
Remember why Microsoft couldn’t scale-up its expertise in building Operating Systems for Desktops/Laptops to Smartphone devices and how Android Operating Systems took a giant leap over it as it was developed as an open-source platform.
Once WordPress is up and running, you can also begin leveraging its robust community of open source developers, who provide regular updates, security patches, and other helpful forms of collaboration to the growing ranks of WordPress users.
“WordPress is nothing but a marketplace for themes, plugins, Tutorials, Developer forums, APIs.”
That same community is also renowned for its regular contributions to the growing list of plugins and themes that offer users endless ways to customize and add new features to their websites.
This ability to continuously contribute to the functionality is a polar opposite of other paid software pricing models, which can seriously diminish an agency’s bottom line.
How Can Digital Agencies Utilize WordPress Better?
From domain to hosting, marketing to sales, branding to customer retention, digital agencies can do anything & everything using WordPress!
Digital Marketing
Schedule Online Appointments
Real Estate Listings
Sell Physical or Digital Goods
WordPress as Lead Generation Tool
Brand Consistency
WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg said it himself back in 2014, “when you think about it, we’re kind of building a web operating system.”
Let’s now compare WordPress functionalities with other popular products available in the market.
#1 Building Web Applications
WordPress is not a framework but offers pre-built, customizable themes. It’s plugin architecture offers a rich user experience and enhances content management.
On the other hand, Laravel is an open-source PHP framework. It provides various features, mainly for complex tasks that arise during the website development process, such as authentication, verification, data management, and others.
Building Web Applications
WordPress
WordPress could be used if you are:
- Creating a content-based website – blog, media portal, online portfolio, etc.
- Developing a quality website within a short time period
- Building a custom-made website for someone who does not possess strong technical skills
- Making an online shop for smaller or medium-sized companies
Laravel
Laravel might be helpful in:
- Building a data-based website – booking service, project management app, payment gateway, etc.
- Developing a custom-made web application with complex features
- Creating a large-scale e-commerce solution
For a detailed comparison, visit this resource.
#2 Building an eCommerce Site
Building an ecommerce Site
WordPress vs Shopify
- If you have a WordPress website already, just install WooCommerce and launch an e-commerce store as an element of that existing website.
- If you don’t have a website yet, launch your ecommerce store with Shopify.
#3 Enhancing UI/UX
WordPress has pre-built themes for building a website. However, adequate knowledge of HTML, JavaScript (JS), CSS is required to customize these themes.
React, Angular, Vue are some popular JavaScript frameworks for frontend customization of your website. These flexible libraries/frameworks help in easy site creation, simple integration, two-way communication, etc.
In simple words, a developer could use these frameworks to edit and customize the pre-built themes so as to enhance UI/UX of any website.
#4 WordPress with headless CMS development
Traditional CMS was designed to manage content for a single channel. However, with the growth of mobile devices/voice search devices/social media, businesses require the same content to be published across different channels.
Here is where Headless Cms comes into play.
Any headless CMS de-links your front-end and back-end applications to manage it independently, which is not the case with traditional CMS.
WordPress by default is not a Headless CMS but thanks to the bundled REST API, you can turn it into a Headless CMS. This would now allow you to publish your website’s content to your Facebook page, Google My Business listing, or your company’s wiki simultaneously. This approach is useful if you want to publish your content to mobile applications, static websites, or advanced web applications.
Watch the video to learn through a real-world example:
Follow this resource for a complete guide on creating headless CMS for your Web Application.
White-label outsourcing in areas like web app development, eCommerce website development, React JS / Vue JS User Enhancement are suitable for agencies that are looking for extra designing/development/marketing resources to share their workload.
ColorWhistle is well-equipped to off-load the needs of such agencies. While we work behind the scenes, you can look great in front of your clients!
WordPress Road Map For The Future
WordPress is always a work-in-progress.
Currently, Phase 2 of the Gutenberg project is underway. The Gutenberg project or ‘WordPress 5.0’ aims to broaden access to web presence. In the past, we have written about how you could prepare your business website for ‘WordPress 5.0’? Click to read.
Throughout 2020, WordPress continued to focus on:
- Creating a block for navigation menus. WPTavern, the official site for WordPress related news opinionated that the Block Editor is here to stay.
- Build a WordPress.org directory for discovering blocks, and a way to seamlessly install them.
- Provide a way for users to opt-in to automatic plugin and theme updates.
- Provide a way for themes to visually register content areas, and expose them in Gutenberg.
- Upgrade the widgets-editing areas and the Customizer to support blocks.
- Provide a way for users to opt-in to automatic updates of major core releases. Automatic updates of core WordPress are slated to officially land in version 5.6.
Version (future releases)
Planned
5.6 (Trac)
5.7
5.8
5.9
6.0
December 2020
March 2021
June 2021
September 2021
December 2021
Here is an opinion article on the WordPress 5.6 wishlist.
Now shifting our focus to WordPress’s parent company – Automattic.
Over these years the company has expanded to include brands like Tumblr, Jetpack, WooCommerce, WordPress.com VIP, Simplenote, Longreads, and more. The company wants to make the web a better place. By releasing a new Spearhead theme targeted at Podcasters and Content Creators, experts imagine it to be the springboard of many upcoming themes, whether in the form of building child themes or using it as a starter.
“Spearhead is not just a theme for WordPress.com users. Self-hosted WordPress users can expect availability in the future.”
This post first appeared on Digital Marketing Services Company | White Label Online Marketing Agency, please read the originial post: here
