Richard Muscat is a User Experience Specialist from Malta. I asked Richard to participate in my ongoing interview series on “Why Businesses Should Use WordPress To Power Their Websites”. Below are his insightful responses. Enjoy!

Q1: Thanks very much for accepting this interview – for those readers who don’t know who you are, could you give us an idea of who you are and what you do?

My name is Richard Muscat and I’m from Malta. I’m a user experience specialist at Red Gate Software in Cambridge (the one in the UK) and in my spare time I contribute research time to SmarterStart on how start-up companies can benefit form user centered design principles.

Q2: How did you get started in your field? Did you study something in particular or are you self-taught?

I’m a self-taught visual and graphic designer but I studied computer science formally and read for a masters degree in creativity and innovation.

Q3: Can you remember what it was that originally got you more than just “interested” in the Web industry?

I was fascinated by the concept of the web before I ever saw it in action and was hooked when a communications professor showed me “Web 0.01″ at the University lab when I was 15. I immediately wanted to know how it worked and procured myself a huge TCP/IP book (that I never read) and a 10-page HTML primer that I learned off by heart within minutes!

Q4: Do you remember the first site you ever built? Was it anything like your current works?

First site I built was for a political student organisation I was part of during my undergraduate degree. Thankfully, it is nothing like my current works… and nothing like their current site.

Q5: What would you say is the single most important aspect of creating a Website – aesthetics, function, or something else?

Usability. If a website looks great but I can’t find the search feature the site is useless. If the search feature works but presents the results unintelligibly the site is also useless. Usability means making it simple for a user to accomplish a task or get information and requires equal focus on form and function.

Q6: Why should a business use WordPress to power their Websites?

Wordpress allows you to manage a website’s content and function independently of how it looks and without specialist knowledge of HTML, CSS, PHP etc. Writing or editing a blog post, article, event or product page is as easy as writing an email in GMail or Yahoo! Mail.

Q7: What type of value will a business receive from using WordPress to power their Website?

Using Wordpress means that your web and HTML specialists can focus on more important projects and removes the need for your PR and marketing people to waste time messing around with (and often break!) the underlying code. You will also be forming part of the Wordpress ecosystem which will both be useful to promoting your website or blog as well as benefit from hundreds of developers and users who contribute to wordpress by creating plugins, themes, fixes and new snippets of functionality.

Q8: What are the pitfalls and disadvantages of a business using WordPress to power their Website?

The big pitfall many people might not be aware of is that while WP is easy to get started with, doing advanced stuff requires a bit of effort in climbing up the learning curve. Not being aware of this – or not having the right expertise available – may easily lead to frustration. Fortunately there are many developers and designers who provide lots of info for free on the web and all it takes to avoid this frustration is to do some homework and understand in some detail what you really want from your website and then making sure it can be accomplished by using Wordpress.

Q9: What are the benefits and advantages of a business using WordPress to power their Website?

Wordpress today is an advanced and highly robust website content management system (CMS) that has been improved and expanded substantially over the years. It provides you with almost everything you may need right out of the box: rich text editing, photo and video management, categorization, commenting, tagging, widgets, multiple users and permissions, statistics and visual customization. It also has the potential to let your website grow to an unlimited size, it is fast and, for most requirements, its free!

Q10: If a business already has a Website, why should business owners consider moving their Website to WordPress?

In a lot of cases, Wordpress is invaluable in terms of freeing up your resources to doing more valuable things for your company. If you’re a start-up with limited resources, use Wordpress to remove the need of hiring a full time web manager or paying a consulting firm to do it for you. If you’re a larger company with some stability, use Wordpress to give more employees direct access and autonomy when it comes to posting news and editing web pages. This removes the bottlenecks and backlogs you often get with your web people dealing with trivial updates and edits (like correcting spelling mistakes!) from all over the company and frees up their time for more useful long-term projects… which could include (quickly) deploying a Wordpress-based Intranet for employees and staff to write and share info about social and company events, etc..

Q11: Finally, thanks very much for the interview, any closing comments?

First of all thank you very much for asking me! It was a pleasure answering the questions and it’s always nice to see communities of people like the one on this site who are focused on improving the life and state of great applications like Wordpress. I hope you give Wordpress a go… it’s much more versatile and powerful than it might seem at first glance and very extensible!