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Judging by these trends, WordPress has definitely created a strong niche for itself in the web arena. This platform could be the best solution for your website as well. The fact that it is open source and has a huge community of developers who are constantly working to improve it makes wordpress an affordable and continuously evolving platform.

Easy content management
Wordpress is the best website building platform for you if you do not understand the technicalities involved in loading content and images onto static HTML web pages. With simplified content management, WordPress has made every website owner capable of managing his website.

Additionally, WordPress offers multi-user access. So, all you have to do is assign a login id and a password to your team members and they can upload, edit and change content on the site from anywhere in the world.

Secure & Futureproof
Wordpress versions, features and security are all available periodically to update through the admin, meaning you never have to change the system in future. This means you will never be left behind with a dated system and your site is totally future proof as well as secure. Bespoke CMS systems and some other open source systems such as Joomla require to have the system replaced every few years which can not only be expensive but awkward with regards to your sites design and growth.

It’s too easy to get stuck with a bespoke CMS built by a web designer, and be tied to that provider when they could either disappear or start taking your eyes out. It’s also fairly impossible for any individual company to provide a bespoke CMS of the same quality, functionality or security as WordPress is built by hundreds of developers worldwide. The real value of it cannot be guesstimated.

Quick and easy website building
Wordpress simplifies the process of building a website. This ensures that your website goes live sooner. In fact, if you choose a ready made template for your website, it can go live within minutes.

At the same time, WordPress comes with a multitude of custom options that appeal to advanced developers. This sort of flexibility makes WordPress very desirable as a web development platform.

What’s more, websites built on this platform look totally professional. This ensures that you don’t compromise on the quality of your website.

Great functionality
Wordpress is extremely functional. You can integrate your wordpress website with a huge number of plugins, widgets, applications as well as social networks. You get a blog as well. These additions make your site very interactive, user friendly and engaging.

You can make use of apps that help you analyse the website and gauge visitors’ response.

Since it is a constantly evolving platform, you can upgrade your website and enhance it regularly. With this kind of functionality, wordpress is a future ready web design platform. You cannot find another option that is so affordable and yet offers so many features.

SEO  
If your website is not SEO friendly, you better not have a website at all. WordPress offers a number of on-page SEO features. Plugins such as All in One SEO can be integrated with the website.

You can also enable H1 and H2 tags. Keyword tagging system on wordpress is advanced and extremely friendly towards search engine spiders.

With such functionality, you cannot deny that a WordPress based CMS website is the best solution for your business.

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Graphic designers now need to be knowledgeable advertisers aside from creative artists. Fortunately, this fusion of artistry and advertisement may be easier achieved than you would think.

There is art in the science of marketing. Through using concepts of an established art style, graphic artists and Web designers can be marketer in part, as their common tasks entail. Minimalism is one such style the concepts of which would apply effectively in marketing.

Minimalism Applied to Marketing
Minimalism is a post-modern art style embracing simplicity and advocating clean, straightforward designs. “Less is more” is the artistic dogma of minimalists, and minimal designs in interior decor, art, and graphics – when done with sufficient acuity – are a pleasure to behold. But beyond just employing minimalist art in ad design, using its very concepts in advertising can help make today’s artist-contractor become a marketer.

Minimalism Concept 1: Less is More
A sound minimalist practice calls for breaking the design. This entails subtracting elements from a design until it breaks or can no longer deliver what or how it was supposed to. Through breaking the design, you effectively take out superfluous elements and retain essential ones. This concept can be applied not just to design, but also to sales pitches and ideas. The main goal is the same: communicating through a succinct medium. In design, the medium is a collage of graphics and art, in a tagline or sales pitch, the medium is the culmination of ideas presented by words.

Want to say your lifestyle diet supplement can provide the slim and supple female form your female demographic craves? Don’t go verbatim. Connect your diet supplement to sexiness.

Obviously, you need to mention your product. You also need to mention the end result which is practically the unique selling proposition (USP) of your pitch. What’s important is that there are as few elements, or in this case words and concepts, between your product and USP:

‘A sexy figure from healthy eating: insert supplement name here.’

You started with the USP, which is what your demographic wants, therefore maximizing your pitch’s impact. You ended with your product after building suspense with a simple break offered by a colon. Placing your product name at the end of a short pitch ensures a reader doesn’t look away before finishing reading. It also increases recall as the last thing a reader sees is your product’s name. You took what you wanted to say, decided on three elements to include in your pitch (your USP, your brand, and what bridges them), and left out the rest.

Minimalist Concept 2: Negative Space
Negative or white space in minimalist design pertains to blank areas in a design canvas. For print design, anywhere without print is negative space. The initial reaction to negative space is that it’s a waste of money. After all, you’re paying for all that space, why not use as much of it as you can?

Negative space helps bring design elements into more prominence. It also keeps the overall design uncluttered. The marketing lessons therefore translate to
1. Draw more attention to advertisement elements that need attention, and
2. Promote a cleaner, more professional corporate image (branding).

Wisely used white space is not wasteful.

Minimalist Concept 3: Fewer Colors
Minimalism advocates the use of fewer colors in design. For advertising, this works brilliantly in tandem with using the psychological associations of color. The fewer the colors, the better a design can communicate the subtle and psychological influences of the colors used. The most important color considerations are the background and foreground colors, or the predominant background color and the text color.

Background colors, taking up a lot of space, can subconsciously set the mood of an advertisement. Foreground colors, on the other hand, promote cognition and recall, both of which are important in marketing.

Stick to a single color background, if possible, and one that sets an appropriate mood for your advertisement – a passionate shade of red for energetic ads or a sunny yellow for bright ones. For foreground colors, use high contrast colors that work well with the background color or image. High contrast colors stimulate cognition better, especially when in good contrast with its background. Avoid any color pitfalls like using red when talking about money (a negative financial connotation) and blue when talking about food (unappetizing).

Advantages of Minimalist Marketing
Aside from inherent advantages of minimalist marketing in practice, there are other consequential advantages that you can benefit from in using this approach:

Improved brevity and impact for a more modern sales pitch – In a world consumed with keeping pace, people are not only used to tuning out useless advertisements, they also don’t have the time to puzzle through advertisement designs and cryptic sales pitches. A minimalist approach to marketing from design to sales pitch gives your advertisement a brevity- and impact boost suitable for a modern age of hustle and bustle.

Decreased risk of overwhelming your target market – Choice paralysis is the ironic phenomenon where consumers tend not to choose any of a plethora of options when made readily available. Too many choices end up confusing them. This is also true in design. Too many graphical and attention-grabbing elements that clash with each other can overwhelm your target market. Instead of increasing recall for your product or service, your advertisement backfires.

Application of neuro-marketing – Minimalism’s concepts can help infuse your advertising campaign with effective neuro-marketing. Proper use of negative space in getting attention and assisting branding and the use of background and foreground colors to affect mood, cognition, and recall are some examples. Better yet, a minimalist approach to marketing lets you employ neuro-marketing in a straightforward manner.

Cost-effective and practical – Being minimal in all aspects of advertising and design, you tend to save on marketing campaign costs. You can save money from not using too many ink colors in your ads and time from not taking too long to design and tweak layer after layer of graphics.

Graphic and Web artists, a great number of them independent contractors, need marketing skill sets required by most of their clients. Owners of small and medium businesses usually hire Web designers, graphic artists, Web masters, and content providers when setting up their websites. They discuss what they need and expect it done with a degree of professional prowess. Not a lot of people hire ‘artists’ per se; they hire ‘designers’ who know how to design to sell. Requisites for a graphic and Web designer’s success now include advertising know how and marketing prowess aside from artistic skill and creative talent. For the multitudes of graphic designers-cum-marketers out there, a minimalist approach to marketing just might work perfectly.

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WordPress has fast become the most widely used and flexible open source web platform. Far from it’s beginnings as a blogging platform, it is now used as a content management system on hundreds of thousands of sites.

The reasons for using WordPress as opposed to a bespoke build are profound and are based in leveraging community development. Suppose you want a website with some kind of functionality such as a directory or community, you could be looking at development costs of over 15K conservatively. If your budget does not stretch that far then you have the option of looking at commercial off the shelf solutions of open source development platforms such as WordPress. The beauty of wordpress is that it’s constantly eveloving and it doesn’t tie you to the provider.

It’s surely a selling piont for any car that you wont have to take it back to the same main dealer when you need things fixed, likewise for websites! Although we certainly want to look after and host your site for you, creating long term relationshis with clients is our goal, buyers should beware of providers tying them in with their ‘bespoke’ platforms that cost whatever they deem to develop further. Open source and WordPress ultimately offers you freedom, freedom from extortion!

WordPress templates are now at the cutting edge of web design and can be purchased for very small costs cosidering the amount of design & development that has gone into them. These templates can be customised, the front end html & css tailored to your brand or projects needs completely so that the site becomes your own.  If your site requires additional functionality to the default blogging and paging CMS system then we can find or build plug ins available and skin those to your brand as well.

If you are looking for an agency to facilitate a wordpress installation and customise a template then we would love to help you.

Take a look at our web portfolio, most of our sites are based on WordPress & Joomla customisations.

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