Apple are known mostly for their fabulous hardware but what really makes their iPhone and iPad sing are the Apps. Apple have worked hard to get the mechanics and business model of their App store just right, it’s a single marketplace, bright and colourful, fun to use, appealing. The single payment route builds trust and keeps things simple and easy for the end user. These stores are obviously making Apple and many of their content providers a lot of money. Cost per unit is generally low but volumes are consequently high. Competition and quality are strong.

Sadly the situation with the expandability of WordPress is not so fabulous. It’s a great platform but it could be so much better. WordPress is community rather than business based and although that all sounds lovely and cosey its currently a bit of a problem. Yes there are the WordPress directories but these are not a patch on an Apple experience and have no single payment gateway. I would estimate that you would be able to buy WordPress additions, be they plugins or themes from hundreds, if not thousands or different vendors using a massive variety of payment routes. Its a scattered marketplace, sometimes done well, sometimes very poorly. Of course thee are some fabulous pay-per-use plugins but these are often overpriced and there are equally many talented individuals relying on donations unable to make a decent living, invest in their ideas and develop high quality software.

I’m writing this in response to the news that support and development for one of my 5 favourite WordPress plugins ‘Login Lock’  has now been abandoned  by its maker.
I quote “Apologies that we can’t continue providing people free support. It got to the point where it took too much time, which obviously distracts from earning money to get the bills paid.” All in all this is a very sad end to a great piece of software and this is not an isolated incident.

If WordPress took a closer look at Apple’s App stores I’m sure they could bring benefits to everyone within the community and encourage WordPress to flourish even more.

Thirteen Eighty has been established as a creative graphic design agency in St Albans since 2004 and this is our third website and our first non-flash site. Why the move away from flash? Well several reasons really. Flash had a lot of advantages – you could do almost anything given the time and skills but there was a cost…

Flash sites were difficult to build in a way that worked well for search engines so SEO could be a problem. It could also be tough on your computers processor – not a problem on a powerful home computer but on a laptop and more so on mobile devices these sites could slow you down and put a strain on your battery.

Apple has been criticised for not supporting flash on it’s iphone and ipad but this was never a technical issue. Apple had made a stand against the use of flash and now Adobe have accepted that flash is not suitable as a mobile platform. So here we are reacting to the changes in the industry, bringing you a site that is consistent where ever it’s viewed.

You might be interested to know that this site uses WordPress as it’s base. Once purely a blogging engine WordPress has grown to become a powerful content management system used by many big name companies to power their websites. It’s powerful, SEO friendly, very cost effective and infinitely customisable – ideal in-fact to power the websites of the real world today.

We hope you enjoy our new WordPress site.

A well crafted WordPress website can be a great asset to you and your business too.  Thirteen Eighty are now offering some great fixed price design solutions for SMEs and start-ups. Please see our small business design packages.