About Wordpress - Slipstream Creative

In late May 2003 WordPress began its life as a fork (alternative development branch) to the cafelog blogging tool. Since its inception WordPress has evolved into the preeminent website development platform.

The popularity, versatility and security of WordPress make it the platform of choice for Slipstream Creative’s web design services.

WordPress is Popular

WordPress now accounts for:

> 50% of the global content management system (CMS) market. ^[1]
12 million of the websites on the entire web use WordPress. ^[2]
33.18% of all site utilising a CMS in New Zealand are powered by WordPress as of May 2016. The next closest rival is Joomla at 4.76%. ^[2]
25.5% of the websites on the entire web are powered by WordPress. ^[3]
30.3% of the top 1000 websites use WordPress. ^[3]

These numbers indicate some serious industry consolidation which in the end is good for the consumer.

WordPress is used by:

New York Observer, New York Post, TED, Thought Catalog, Williams, USA Today, CNN, Fortune.com, TIME.com, National Post, Spotify, TechCrunch, CBS Local, NBC, Chrysler Capital and many many more. ^[4]

WordPress is Versatile

The versatility of WordPress as a development platform is second only to its widespread adoption. There is a vibrant active third party ecosystem that build plugins. Depending on your needs, these plugins can significantly enhance the utility and performance of your site while being very cost effective.

With 40,000+ plugins available, there is plenty to choose from. Some of the most popular are:

WooCommerce, NextGEN Gallery, WordPress Importer, WP Super Cache, Google Analytics by Yoast, Google XML Sitemaps, Jetpack, Contact Form 7, Yoast SEO, All in One SEO Pack, Wordfence Security. ^[5][6]

WordPress is Secure

Like any ubiquitous platform the threat to security is ever present. Just like Microsoft Windows in its heyday, the security of your WordPress site is a function of how it is implemented, monitored and managed.

When it comes to ensuring your site’s security, the team at Slipstream follow these basic rules:

Automatic updates to WordPress running in your site as soon as the latest version becomes available:
Monitor site uptime with real time notifications so we always know exactly what is going on.
Isolate your site on our own virtual server and monitor all traffic into and out of this closed environment,
We utilise Cloudflare to enhance performance and security.

Cloudflare is a layer of protection in front of your website. Cloudflare automatically learns and identifies attacks and blocks them before ever reaching your website. In most cases any exploits in common web frameworks have already been patched by Cloudflare before even being publicly released in the wild. ^[7][8]

Regular site and virtual server backups using ManageWP ^[10] and Digital Ocean ^[9]. If a site goes down or does get hacked, we can isolate and understand the attack, instantly spin up a new server and have your site up and running within minutes from backup. Alternatively if the server is intact, we can reactivate the site from the Manage WP ^[9] backup. No fuss!
When extending system functionality, we write our own plugins.

When required to use third party plugins for things like payment gateways we conduct a code audit to ensure security and we only choose secure and well supported plugin implementations.

Slipstream’s experience as a creative design studio enhances our website development product. It becomes a collaborative effort between designers and developers allowing us to push the bounds of what is possible in online production.

By adopting WordPress as our platform of choice we have the ability create beautiful custom or WordPress Theme sites to suit nearly any budget.

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