Month: July 2022

5 Reasons Why Bellaworks Uses WordPress for Website Design and Development

Posted on by jenny

If you’re in the market for a new or updated website, you’re probably seeing lots of different options that are available for website design and development. From Wix to Weebly to Shopify and Squarespace, there are so many products out there.  

At Bellaworks, we build websites exclusively on WordPress. Our small but mighty team both designs and develops websites in-house, giving us full control of the process and the results. We’ve built websites for small and large companies in a wide variety of industries. No two websites are ever the same. 

Here are some of the reasons why WordPress is our platform of choice and what advantages it has for you as a consumer.

Market Dominance

Almost one-third of all websites are built on WordPress. It’s the most widely known and supported website content management system (CMS). WordPress is an exceedingly flexible platform that can serve a wide variety of websites. 

One key advantage to business owners is that WordPress websites are very portable. Many industry professionals know WordPress and will be able to work on your website. It’s like having a car that most mechanics can work on versus a rare import that no one can find parts for or fix.

Easy to Update

As far as websites are concerned, WordPress sites have very user-friendly back-end dashboards. With training, even people with little tech experience can quickly learn to make updates to a WordPress site. 

It’s important to keep your website updated with current information and fresh content, and the ease of doing so is obviously crucial. Our Bellaworks clients appreciate the ability to login and make changes to copywriting, add blog posts, or switch out photos as the need arises. Some of our clients prefer to have us make updates by initiating a work order.  

Flexible Functionality 

WordPress is compatible with a wide range of plugins and other software that can be very helpful in extending the functionality of your website. Plugins are individual pieces of software that can be downloaded and added to your website. You can think of them like apps that you add to your phone. Plugins can help increase speed, security, and SEO, and they can capture leads and so much more. There are both free and paid options available. 

Websites can and should do more than just provide information about your company. They can provide tools that help you work more efficiently and effectively, and plugins are a way of adding these tools.   

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

WordPress is widely regarded as one of the best platforms to use in order to build SEO with the search engines. It has countless tools and options you can use to help you format your copy and photos to help build SEO.

One of these tools is a free plugin called YoastSEO. Yoast can help you optimize your website’s content in order to connect with the search engines. For example, you can customize page URLs with user-friendly keywords for which you want your website to be found. You can optimize the size of photos so your pages load quickly and add alt text with words and phrases that can be found in searches. It can help you format your pages with headlines and subheadings that help the search engines understand information on your website. 

If SEO is important, WordPress is an excellent choice for your website.

Hosting

Our WordPress websites are self-hosted, meaning that you choose your own hosting provider. You own your WordPress files and have full control of them through your login credentials. You can select the hosting provider that has the right combination of speed, service, security, and price for your website.

WordPress allows you options with hosting, just like it does with so many other areas of website ownership. When you host with Bellaworks, you are backed by the Bellaworks team and you can have live support 24/7 from a team of hosting experts. 

In Conclusion

Our team of experts at Bellaworks uses our knowledge and experience to create WordPress websites for all kinds of companies in all kinds of industries. It allows us full flexibility with design and development and our clients enjoy full flexibility with website service and support. 

Reach out to our team, and let’s get started on a new website for you.

The Three Key Pieces that Run Your Website

Posted on by jenny

If you are diving into a website design project for the first time, it can feel like entering a whole new world. Terms like “domain name” and “hosting services” get thrown around, and it can quickly become overwhelming!

To help with this, we are going to explain these three key things that you need in order to operate a website. 

  1. Website domain name
  2. Website files
  3. Website hosting

This will give you some understanding of what these services are and the different types of options for each one.

Website Domain

Simply put, a website domain is a website’s home address on the internet. 

Domains can have different extensions like .com, .net, .org, .edu and so on. The value in the common extensions like .com or .org is simply that they are standard and easy for people to use and remember. 

Domains are purchased through registrars like GoDaddy or Namecheap. A domain price can change based on add-ons and services, but the price for the actual domain will be the same regardless of where you buy it. The price is based on what the sellers think that the market will bear. Common names that might appeal to many people can be expensive. Unique names are often cheaper. Either way, simple names that are easy to use are preferable.

Pro tip:

Once you purchase your domain name, you need to keep up with the renewals. The invoices are usually sent by the registrars via email, and they can be easily missed. If your domain is up for renewal and your credit card on file has expired, your domain can fail to renew. If this happens, your website will go down, and you will likely spend hours fixing the mess. In order to avoid all of this, Bellaworks offers clients the option of keeping domains in our account. We keep up with the renewals to make sure you never miss one.

Fun Fact:

Curious as to how domains work? Here’s a quick explanation. 

Computers talk to each other using numerical IP addresses. While this works great for computers, it’s not very user friendly for humans. So, when you type a website address into an internet browser, that domain name helps route you to a server that decodes it into an IP address. Then, you’re pointed to the specific website that you want to access. Handy, right!

You might wonder… What’s the difference between a URL and a domain name?

The URL is the complete address of a specific webpage. A domain name is the root address for an entire website.

Here’s an example:

URL = https://bellaworksweb.com/about

Domain name is in bold.

Website Files

Did you know that websites are really a bunch of files? Yep. The pages are designed and laid out with your copywriting, photos, etc. and then they are developed, or coded, on a platform. 

At Bellaworks, we build all of our websites on WordPress. We can use preset design templates or we can custom build your website from scratch. Once we build your website, you will own the files, and there is no ongoing subscription type fee just to have your website files. 

Fun fact:

When we build a new WordPress website, we will build it on a development server. Once your website is built, we will compress and save your old website files and send them to you if you’d like to keep them. We will then redirect your domain from your old website files to your new files. This cuts out website downtime and makes the process very smooth.

Pro Tip:

Imagine you are updating some content on your website and something goes haywire. Your page is all of a sudden a mess, and you can’t figure out how to fix it. Agh! One huge safety net is having access to daily backups of your website files. This way if your site is ever compromised for any reason, you can quickly roll back to the last copy of your website files.

Hosting

A website host provides stable and secure storage for your website files so they can be easily accessed by internet users. Quality hosting contributes to the proper functioning of your website and a good user experience. In turn, this can affect your website’s position in search engine returns.  

There are many different types of hosting options available with a variety of price points. Less expensive hosting typically offers customers space on a shared server. Your price may be low but the risk of your site being compromised will be high because the environment will be less secure. On the other end of the spectrum, you can have your own dedicated server where you host just your website. This cuts security and performance risks but increases your costs. 

At Bellaworks, we provide high-quality hosting services that balance security, space, and price. We use managed WordPress hosting. This type of hosting goes beyond just providing a spot on the internet. It includes additional support that helps optimize the performance and security of your website in order to keep it running smoothly. This can include blocking malware and hacking attempts at the server level, making sure you’re always running the latest and most secure version of WordPress, and caching your pages to ensure fast loading. Also, our clients can have access to real live human support 24/7 should they ever need help, like a copy of a website backup file.

In Conclusion

Our team at Bellaworks hopes this article helps demystify these three key pieces that combine to run your website. If you have any further questions or want to talk about your website or hosting, please contact us. We are always happy to share more information about how all of this works so our clients can make the best decisions for their company.