WordPress for Electric Cooperatives

Why WordPress for Co-ops?

Word­Press is easy for you and your employ­ees to learn, no mat­ter how much of a novice you may think you are so that you can just jump in and hit the ground run­ning.

Word­Press con­trols the visu­als and writ­ten con­tent with­in your website’s larg­er design frame­work. With this user-friend­ly CMS, you and your team can edit text, swap out or add images, make PDFs and oth­er files avail­able for down­load, and much more – with­out the ser­vices of a web devel­op­er or wor­ry­ing about break­ing the site’s func­tion or design.

Because Word­Press is the most pop­u­lar CMS on the mar­ket, it offers the widest range of fea­tures avail­able. It’s no sur­prise then that more and more elec­tric coop­er­a­tives are uti­liz­ing the pow­er of Word­Press.

Powerful, Not Overpowering

In search­ing for elec­tric co-op con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems, you will no doubt come across oth­er sol­id sys­tems that would do the job, but they are often com­plex, with steep learn­ing curves, cre­at­ed for devel­op­ers or intre­pid techies equipped with lots of expe­ri­ence and time on their hands. Case in point: Dru­pal, the beast of a CMS that pow­ers a lot of big gov­ern­ment agency web­sites.

WhiteHouse.gov made the switch from Dru­pal to Word­Press in 2017 and the U.S. Depart­ment of State fol­lowed suit.

As to why the whitehouse.gov site moved from Dru­pal to Word­Press, the pri­ma­ry moti­va­tion appears to be mon­ey. Accord­ing to a report in the Wash­ing­ton Exam­in­er, the move to Word­Press is all about cost sav­ing, with the relaunched site sav­ing U.S. tax­pay­ers an esti­mat­ed $3 mil­lion a year. – eWeek

Man­ag­ing your web­site shouldn’t be hard. Co-op com­mu­ni­ca­tors are busy peo­ple. Unless you’re staffed to tack­le a com­pli­cat­ed web project and have deep pock­ets, Word­Press is the obvi­ous plat­form of choice. The admin dash­board is user-friend­ly and easy to nav­i­gate – plus we offer ongo­ing sup­port ser­vices as much or as lit­tle as you need us, and we pro­vide you access to our selec­tion of video tuto­ri­als and guides.

What Will My Website’s Future Look Like?

Unteth­ered free­dom. There are no long-term con­tracts, required ser­vice tiers, or ven­dor lock-ins. You are free to go any­where with your site with­out sub­stan­tial switch­ing efforts. Your site is yours: you own it, not us. Of course, we hope you’ll keep us around for the long haul to pitch in as need­ed.

Our clients have access to a wide vari­ety of plu­g­ins – bat­tle-test­ed mod­ules or “apps” that inte­grate and run on top of the Word­Press soft­ware and are cre­at­ed to accom­plish all sorts of fea­tures and for­go many expen­sive, cus­tom solu­tions – that allow your web­site to evolve as need­ed and grow with you for years to come. The start­ing point of all our sites is a mobile-first web­site, built on an acces­si­ble plat­form, that can even be reskinned in the future and giv­en a new look, with­out hav­ing to com­plete­ly start over from scratch.

Between the flex­i­bil­i­ty of own­er­ship with­out con­tracts, a robust, mobile- and acces­si­bil­i­ty-friend­ly design and struc­ture, and plen­ty of care­ful­ly curat­ed Word­Press plu­g­ins at your dis­pos­al, your site is guard­ed against becom­ing dat­ed before its time – it will be sol­id, reli­able, and extend­able for the long haul.

Bulletproof Web Hosting

Flex­i­bil­i­ty and ease of use are impor­tant when it comes to web­site admin­is­tra­tion and upkeep, but there’s more to the equa­tion; web­site secu­ri­ty, reli­a­bil­i­ty, and speed are crit­i­cal. To that end, we use a man­aged host­ing infra­struc­ture on the Google Cloud that’s opti­mized specif­i­cal­ly for Word­Press, result­ing in faster load times and bet­ter over­all per­for­mance.

With man­aged host­ing, you’ll retain full con­trol of your web­site but you won’t share resources with oth­er sites as you would on a shared host­ing account. That way, we can all sleep well at night know­ing your site is in the hands of a ded­i­cat­ed, 24/7 sup­port staff of experts – with all the nec­es­sary resources, back­ups, and fail­safe – keep­ing an eye on servers that are fine-tuned for opti­mal Word­Press per­for­mance.