Why Choose Arrow Over WordPress?

One of the most common questions I get asked by new clients and consultants is why we use a custom Content Management System (CMS) in 2017 when there are widely available free and Open Source frameworks like WordPress. The answer is that Arrow is built from the ground up for marketing your business, and WordPress is not. Let me explain:

WordPress is quite possibly the most popular CMS solution, bar none. It’s equipped with a relatively easy to understand What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor, while still allowing users to get waist deep in HTML and CSS if they have the skills to do so. Additionally, there are plugins of varying quality that can transform any part or feature of your website into whatever you need. A well optimized and lean WordPress can score very well in Google’s Page Speed if the right steps are taken to boost load times and reduce external resources. WordPress is also a part of a global network, where statistics on running versions, installed plugins, user counts, activity, and IPs can all be tracked.

All that said, WordPress is built around the idea of constantly changing blog content. If you are running a less dynamic site, you’ll have to address a number of issues before you can start delivering a good experience to your clients, especially if you have a feature rich site. And to top that off, if you do have a feature rich site, then you don’t have a lean WordPress deployment. It can sometimes take several plugins to accomplish a single objective, each one negatively impacting how fast your site can load. And to make that even worse each will have it’s own take on a user interface, increasing the learning curve just to use the tools you have available.

Unlike WordPress, Arrow was designed by a single team for a single purpose, helping you run and market your business. Our user interface follows the same sort of internal logic that you might find in a text editor or writing application. If something works one way in the pages manager, rest assured it will work that same way in the blog and event systems. No more need to spend hours learning how to use each and every tool on your website, and more time spent running your business.

We understand that while blogs and other dynamic content driving systems are becoming more and more important in how web traffic is shaped, we also know that a good website gets the information your clients are looking for at any given moment to them as fast as possible. Like WordPress, Arrow is built around the concept of modular systems. After we consult with you about the purpose of your website, we will load your framework with the exact tools you’ll need. Since we’ve built this system from the ground up, we can modify the code to match your exact specifications.

Why Choose Arrow Over WordPress?

Like WordPress, Arrow functions as part of a network, sharing anonymous data with us about what versions of which tools you are running, your core framework version, and live reporting of errors your framework might encounter so that we can help you solve problems as they occur, rather than waiting until one of your clients or employees notices something is wrong.

Error Reporting

Arrow is built from the ground up with speedy content delivery in mind. Your client facing pages will only load what resources they need to run, and our framework is capable of compressing and decompressing code dynamically to ensure absolutely no time is wasted waiting for resources that are not optimized to load. Additionally, out of the box, Arrow supports caching all pages, dynamic or static, into HTML pages so that the client never has to wait for the server to build the page they are requesting.

Arrow is designed for businesses. A bare-bones install of the framework has built-in tools for helping you and your staff create functional and performative on-page SEO. Twitter and Facebook integration of your website only require a few authentication codes from your Facebook and Twitter accounts to enable, making it easy to push your dynamic content to several platforms in a single easy step.

Productivity Graph

And on top of all that, Arrow has a full suite of tools to expand the framework into a fully featured Client Relationship Manager, with client-notes, scheduled followups, email templates, employee productivity monitoring, ticket generation, task tracking and scheduling, per employee event calendars, notification emails, a fully customization internal cron system that can run with or without server-size cron-tab support, and many more features I could go on about for days.

Let’s boil all that down to a short answer: we use Arrow because it’s custom built to get information about your business into the hands of your clients as fast and as easily as possible. It has built-in tools to help market your business, and it has the support of a team of full-time developers who are passionate about the work they do.

We created Arrow as a platform to help you run your business better. Let us help your business!