Many language schools and language service providers look for new ways to improve their marketing results. And many have learned and discovered that WordPress could help them with quite a few essential marketing success elements for their promotions.
Since Google as a leading search engine puts a lot of focus on how your user experience is on your websites and factors that into the ranking and how well your language school is found in the search engines, it is worth to take a look what makes the perfect language school WordPress theme.
Why WordPress Is So Popular
Since 2003 WordPress has taken the Internet by storm making it the most favorite selected software to run a website.
The open source free software is quite often the preferred choice for webmasters and programmers – it is versatile and can be customized to almost any need.
With their “modular box” like architecture, you can add functionality as-you-need it using smart plugins and template themes to change the look-and-feel of your website “on the go”.
Both their own hosted services at wordpress.com and the software that can be downloaded and installed on any web hosting of your liking is popular. They are even a growing number of web hosts that are specialized on WordPress web hosting.
Positive Things To Consider Working With WordPress
There are many positive things to consider when working with WordPress. Here are the most important ones.
Choose The Perfect WordPress Theme And Get Those Benefits
The Genuity of WordPress is that is based on two parts: one part of being your content, all the text, images and video that you add – and the second part being the functionality of your website being a combination of the web design itself – the so-called WordPress Themes and the WordPress Plugins, building blocks that add almost any desired functionality to your website.
Examples of WordPress plugins are Image-Galleries to showcase your products and services, embedding updated information from other popular websites, such as weather forecasts, related news from social media that can be embedded or functions to help people to share your content on social media with others to gain more attention and traffic to your website.
The time-saving idea behind having content and design/function seperated is obvious. You can focus on creating and adding valuable content and you are flexible to change the design of your website at will without the need to hire and pay a designer and/or a programmer.
Many of those WordPress-Themes and Plugins are actually free of charge and are often the perfect choice for startups and companies with a limited budget.
If you choose the right Word-Press system you can enjoy many benefits.
- A great user experience: a website that is modern and makes it easy and fun to navigate
- A website that is loading fast and is automatically optimized for smart phones and tablets
- Getting new email subscribers fast
- Helping to gain trust with potential new customers
- Spreading the news on social media what your language school can do for new language students
- Helping you maintain your website with many automated and prescheduled functions like being able to pre-write and then set-and-forget-content.
Is WordPress Giving You An SEO Advantage?
You can read a lot of crazy things about WordPress online and if you do your research always be aware of why someone is publishing favorable WordPress information in the first place.
Do they want you to buy WordPress-related products and services?
Wordpress alone is NOT a guarantee for better results in the search engines, no matter what people and “gurus” tell you online.
The reality is this: any website system that follows recommended Google practices and helps the search engine spiders – the robots that search the Internet for new websites and content – to discover your website.
Every couple of years or even months there is a new company entering the market with a lot of hype that they are “the new thing to get your website more attention”.
Whether it be Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, IM Creator, EzyWebs or whatever the flavor of the month is – in the end, what counts is compelling relevant content that makes potential language student believe that you are the best solution for them to book their studies with you.
Why WordPress Can Be A Nightmare
There are also a couple of aspects why WordPress can turn into a nightmare if you do not consider them and start using it naively thinking it is the best “time saving” piece of software there is.
Negative Things To Consider Working With WordPress
Some of the very same benefits what makes WordPress so versatile is actually the greatest danger and waste of time: the ever-growing possibilities to add plugins and new shiny themes with the latest web designs.
Don’t be fooled: WordPress means big business for a lot of designers and programmers to come up constantly with the latest “magic marketing thing” that promises to make your language services website look even sexier than last month.
The obscene amount of time business owners sometimes spend to do research and being unable to make a final decision on what WordPress Theme and plugins should be in place, is unbelievably high.
Mix the wrong WordPress Plugins and Render Your Website Unusuable
There is an endless number of WordPress-Plugins that can do whatever you want. Show the current weather in your location? Help people to share your content on social media? Sign up for your newsletter? Display videos from Youtube? Add a Twitter-Feed? Add a shopping cart to your website?
The more plugins you will add the sooner or later you will encounter serious conflicts between them.
That SEO-optimizing plugin does not like your weather plugin. The shopping cart plugin has a problem with the plugin that you planned to use for translating your WordPress website into different languages.
Some of those plugin conflicts are that bad that your website will not work. Other conflicts are much worse – while your website will work, they will add elements and codes to your website that will slow it down.
And some will hurt your search engine rankings by combining slow page loading speed, faulty code and for example incorrectly formatted sitemaps that prevent Google and other search engines to list your content correctly.
Choose The Wrong WordPress Theme And Deal With Endless Troubles
Theoretically, you can add content to a WordPress system and switch and change any desired WordPress Design Template to change the look of your website within minutes.
However, the practical truth is far away from this. If you have chosen to use one of the popular “Visual Design Templates” where you can move around graphical elements of your website with the mouse without being a programmer yourself – be in for a rude awakening.
You thought you can save on paying a programmer to optimize your WordPress Theme and started to use those “Visual Designer” WordPress solutions?
You are probably not being able to switch the WordPress Theme to another provider without having to start all over again and re-edit and fix the complete website content.
It might take you weeks and even months before you are able to relaunch your website instead of the promised “several days”.
What WordPress Will NOT Accomplish For You
A few things you have to be realistic about: using WordPress alone will not boost your sales and improve your Internet marketing efforts overnight.
WordPress will not help you in those crucial and important building blocks for your Internet marketing success:
1. The quality of your potential customers for your language website depends on high-quality content that needs to be professionally written for your company.
There is no replacement for unique quality content. Search engines always favor originality that stands out and that real human beings like, share and engage with.
2. The loading speed of your web server is a very important aspect for ranking high on the search engines.
Just because you use WordPress it will not mean it will speed up your website. You need to optimize your images to load fast and have tools in place to optimize the loading time of your website. In web hosting, it usually is worth paying more for higher speed and being optimized for WordPress.
3. The quality of your language services.
I always hope that I do not have to mention this. But I still encounter too many language services that are too lazy and think they can get away with offering “the same old same” and still make a decent profit.
If you are just another language school in the ever-growing number of wanna-be-language-providers and think you just can a make-believe-website and become an overnight-success, think again.
Wordpress is not a magic pill to get you ahead of your competition: the true quality of your language services will!