The 6 reasons why AMC networks chose WordPress for their Intranet

We love WordPress and we’re often singing its praises. However, we believe that praise is even more powerful when it comes from our clients.

In this article, we look at the 6 reasons that led AMC Networks International (AMC) to choose WordPress as the platform for their new intranet.

In late 2016, we were contacted by Andrew Fox from AMC. They were looking to build a new company intranet and wanted to use WordPress.

We were lucky enough to be chosen as their development partner and we successfully launched the new intranet last year.

Recently, I was thinking about all of the different intranet platforms available, and what would lead someone to choose WordPress. Internally, we’re very aware of the great reasons, but it would be interesting to find out what our clients think.

I emailed Andrew, asking:

When commissioning an intranet what made you go down the custom WordPress route rather than one of the other intranet solutions out there?

Andrew responded with 6 reasons:

• Free
• Easy to setup
• Hardware light
• Easy to administrate
• Easy to edit (familiar UI to word etc)
• Evolving technology

Let’s have a look at each of those now.

Free

Ok, so we didn’t work pro-bono on this project! But what Andrew means here is that WordPress is open-source software. There is no license fee to pay in order to use it.

That contrasts with many other proprietary intranet platforms where there are monthly or annual fees to pay.

There are usually some ongoing costs with a WordPress site, for example hosting, domain names, maintenance, and plugin licenses. However, these often cost much less than a platform license and some can be eliminated entirely. For example, AMC are hosting the intranet on their internal servers.

Easy to set up

AMC are setting up separate intranets for their multiple business units. WordPress makes this very straightforward. We provide AMC with either a blank installation or a clone of one of the existing intranets and they upload that to their servers.

Hardware light

I honestly hadn’t considered this benefit. WordPress runs on most web servers, so the chances are that, if you have an internal company server, it can be made to work.

It’s also possible to install your WordPress intranet on an external web server and use it like a standard web application – which means that you don’t need to worry about hardware at all.

Resource

Check out WordPress hosting requirements here: https://wordpress.org/about/requirements/. As you’ll see, they are really basic.

Easy to administrate

This is really what WordPress is all about – and what we’re passionate about at Highrise Digital.

WordPress is a ubiquitous platform these days and many people are familiar with the interface – but it is also intuitive for new users.

A well thought out and well-built administration interface will make it easy for your team to accomplish the key tasks such as managing users, adding posts and organising your documents and resources.

Easy to edit

Similar to the point above, the edit screens in WordPress will be familiar to many and the text editor, in particular, has a very familiar MS Word feel to it.

If your content requires more specific data than just plain text, custom administration screens can be built to make managing your data easy and intuitive.

Important

There’s a big change coming to WordPress this year with a completely revamped editing experience. It’s still in the works, and hopefully, it will be a big improvement.

Join our newsletter to keep up to date with these developments.

Evolving technology

With a huge, international developer base, WordPress is in continuous development. It is constantly maturing and evolving, and there are more and more integrations and features every day.

What started out as a simple blogging platform has quickly become a solid content management system, used at an enterprise level, and, with 60% of the CMS market share, the dominant force in web publishing.

A few extras

I thought it would be worth throwing in a few of the other reasons that make WordPress such a great choice for intranets.

Integrations

Being open-source means that developers can build whatever integrations they want to. Do you have some business software that you’d like to integrate? Maybe a project management tool, or your business share price? If there’s an available API, then we can probably build you a custom integration (if there isn’t one already).

Developer community

The success of WordPress has been built on the large and open community of developers that contribute to the software.

This huge pool of talent means that you will never be stuck for help, even if your original developers aren’t available (we plan on sticking around!).

WordPress Multisite

This could be one of the most compelling and powerful reasons to use WordPress. WordPress Multisite allows you to build a network of WordPress websites all running off the same codebase and centrally administrated.

Each website can have its own set of users, but it’s also possible to be a global user or a user of more than one site.

This allows organisations to have Intranets for different offices, divisions, locations, regions, and more – without the overhead of multiple codebases, logins and maintenance.

It is even possible to write content centrally, and push it out to the whole network, whilst maintaining autonomy for each individual site to publish it’s own content too.

Wrapping it up

I hope that gives a useful overview of what makes WordPress such a great choice as an intranet platform for your organisation.

Do you have any questions? I’d love to hear from you. Please use the contact form below to get in touch.