How do you present content on your website? Do you prefer straight text or a combination of text and graphs? If you associate charts with something boring, you’re going to change your mind!
Not a secret that graphs work pretty well for business websites, especially for those that deal with bookkeeping, analytics or consulting. The benefit is obvious – charts can actually help to get your point across a lot faster than multiple paragraphs of text. Besides, there are so many ways to visualize your content with their help.
In this respect, WordPress is one of the best CMS to use for building charts because it can be featured with a variety of plugins, as well as business WordPress themes that work perfectly well together. One of the best WordPress plugins for building charts is DW Chart by DesignWall. It’s possible to create 10 professional looking types of charts using DW Chart only. Already thrilled? Then, let’s take a closer look!
Area charts are much like those typical line charts you’re used to seeing, the only difference is that they display different colors in the areas below the lines. Thanks to the wise use of color, it’s possible to distinguish the data much better. Most likely, you’ve come across two types of area charts: step-area charts and spline area charts. Step-area charts utilize vertical and horizontal lines to connect the points in a series forming a step-like progression. Spline-area charts visualize data points connected by smooth curves instead of straight lines.
A bar chart demonstrates grouped data using rectangular bars with lengths that change proportionally to the values they represent. Bar graphs can be vertical (column bar chart) or horizontal, as well as grouped or stacked bar graphs. They present bars clustered in groups or demonstrate the bars divided into subparts to present the collective effect respectively.
If you have not many data points to visualize, yet you want to create a demonstrative chart, use a column chart. This type of chart is mostly used for laying out the data that shows how the trends change over time. It is also one of the easiest to understand, even for those individuals, unfamiliar with reading graphs.
A geo chart basically is a map of the world with colorized areas of interest which can be represented by a separate region, a country or a continent. No legend is displayed in Geo Chart, the designated regions are only marked according to the value that needs to be specified.
A line chart is aimed to visualize information as a number of points connected by straight line segments. It is convenient to utilize a line chart in many fields because of its versatility. As many other charts, a line graph is used to demonstrate trends in data over the time (a time series), this is why the line is drawn in chronological order.
A pie chart (known as a circle chart) is often used to demonstrate the numerical proportion in the form of a circular statistical graphic, divided into slices. Each slice is proportional to the numerical data it represents. Pie charts are often used in business and in mass media.
In spite of their wide use, some experts recommend avoiding them, saying that these types of graphs are the least demonstrative and it’s difficult to compare the sections of a particular pie chart, or even to compare different pie graphs.
This why in most cases pie charts may be successfully replaced by other types of graphs such as bar charts, box charts or dot charts.
There are times when you need to show the correlation between the planned and actual numbers (for instance, the projected sales and the actual sales for multiple time periods). That’s when a combination chart comes in handy. The combo chart shows several bar charts grouped in one, which is great for comparing values in different categories because the combination gives the understanding about which one is higher or lower.
Also, if you need to emphasize various information types within a specific chart, you can combine several chart types within a single chart. For instance, it’s possible to put together a column chart with a line chart.
A waterfall chart is a type of graph that helps to understand how an initial value is affected by a series of positive or negative values. The columns are color-coded, with each color representing positive and negative values to distinguish between. The waterfall chart is usually utilized for analytical purposes.
The waterfall chart is also called “flying bricks” chart or Mario chart as a reference to an old video game, because of the suspension of columns (“bricks”) in mid-air. Often in finance, it will be referred to as a “bridge”.
A scatter plot (also called a scatter graph or a scatter chart) uses a system of coordinates to display values for two variables for a set of data. Basically, on a scatter chart a single point is put to represent each piece of data in a series without connecting them. If the points are color-coded, you can increase the number of displayed data. This type of graph can be used for scientific experiments when there is a need to show non-linear relationships between different types of data.
A trendline chart is used to depict trends in existing data or to make a forecast the future development.
Most likely, you’ve seen trendline charts in the briefs related to finance or stock trading where a trend line represents a bounding line for the price movement. Also, trend lines are a widely used in technical analysis approach for judging entry and exit investment timing.
Conclusion
As you can see, DW Chart Plugin is an extremely powerful tool that provides you with a number of features to supply your content with charts of different kinds. It can be used for business and analytics online resources to make your content look more descriptive and credible. Have you tried using DW Chart on your WordPress website already? What do you think about it? Feel free to sound off in the comments below!
