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  • Florida Business Briefs — February 27, 2026
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Florida Business Briefs — February 27, 2026

Brian French 9 minutes read
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Why Florida Businesses Are Ditching WordPress for Webflow

For years, WordPress has been the default choice for Florida business websites, and for understandable reasons — it is free at its core, powers over 43% of all websites globally, and benefits from a massive library of themes and plugins. But a growing number of Florida entrepreneurs and marketing teams are discovering that WordPress’s headline advantages come with a mounting list of headaches: plugin conflicts, slow load times, constant security updates, unpredictable maintenance costs, and the near-constant need for a developer to translate design ideas into reality. The article makes the case that for most Florida businesses, the platform’s supposed flexibility has become a liability.

Enter Webflow, the all-in-one visual website platform that combines design, content management, and hosting under one roof. Unlike WordPress, Webflow does not require plugins to achieve professional results — its most popular WordPress plugin equivalents are built directly into the platform. Design teams can work visually with pixel-level precision without writing a single line of code, and because everything is hosted natively on Webflow’s infrastructure, sites load fast and stay secure without the usual plugin patchwork. For Florida businesses in competitive markets like Miami, Orlando, and Tampa, where first impressions matter enormously, the design quality ceiling on Webflow is meaningfully higher than what most WordPress sites achieve in practice.

The article highlights that for Florida Website Marketing and similar Florida digital agencies, the switch to Webflow has been especially significant. A Florida-based marketing agency that previously needed both a front-end designer and a back-end developer to execute a client site rebuild can now often accomplish the same result with a single Webflow-trained designer. That efficiency translates directly into lower costs and faster turnaround times for Florida business clients. For businesses running lean teams, that kind of operational simplicity is hard to put a price on.

That said, WordPress is not going away, and the article stops well short of calling it obsolete. Content-heavy operations — major news platforms, multi-author blogs, large e-commerce sites built on WooCommerce — still benefit from WordPress’s depth and scalability. The honest answer for most Florida businesses is that the right platform depends entirely on what a company actually needs its website to do. But for the growing category of Florida businesses that need a fast, beautiful, conversion-focused site maintained without an army of technical staff, the argument for Webflow has never been stronger. The key is making the choice deliberately, with clear eyes about the real costs and capabilities of each platform.


AntiqueVideoNews.com Is Changing How People Learn About Art and Antiques

The world of fine art and antiques has long carried a reputation for exclusivity — galleries where the prices are never posted, auction houses that seem to operate in a language only insiders understand, and an unspoken culture that discourages questions and makes newcomers feel unwelcome. Tampa-based entrepreneur Brian French, founder of Wondrous-Things.com, has set out to dismantle that culture entirely with the launch of AntiqueVideoNews.com, a free video platform dedicated to making art and antique education accessible, engaging, and free of artificial intimidation.

The platform’s premise is straightforward: appreciation of art and antiques should begin with curiosity, not credentials. AntiqueVideoNews.com organizes its content across six primary categories — Old Master Art, Contemporary Art, Antique Furniture, Ceramics and Porcelain, Jewelry and Watches, and Auction Market Insights — covering the subjects that enthusiasts and collectors most want to understand. The videos are designed to break down complex topics into accessible explanations, answer questions that beginners are often too embarrassed to ask in traditional settings, and democratize auction market knowledge that has historically been available only to established collectors and industry insiders.

French positions the platform not merely as a content website but as a cultural movement. The art and antique world, he argues, has been artificially gatekept for too long — a dynamic that benefits no one except those already inside the gate. By stripping away the mystique and presenting information in plain, engaging video format, AntiqueVideoNews.com lowers the barrier to entry for people who have always been curious about fine art and collectibles but never felt confident enough to engage. In a digital landscape dominated by auction house websites aimed at active buyers and specialist trade publications aimed at professionals, AVN carves out a genuinely underserved niche: the interested non-expert who simply wants to learn.

The platform has been well received in its early phase, drawing visitors from across the collector community and beyond. Brian French brings to the project decades of experience in the fine art and antiques trade through Wondrous Things, his Tampa-based gallery and retail operation specializing in fine art, antiques, and oriental ceramics. That deep background in actual transactions — what things are worth, why prices move, how to evaluate condition and provenance — gives the AVN content an authenticity that purely editorial educational platforms often lack. Art and antique enthusiasts interested in expanding their knowledge can visit AntiqueVideoNews.com and add the site to their online favorites for ongoing access to an expanding video library.


New Insurers Keep Entering Florida’s Property Insurance Market

For Floridians who spent the better part of the past decade dealing with skyrocketing premiums, policy cancellations, and a dwindling roster of private insurers willing to write homeowner coverage in the state, the news has been genuinely encouraging. Florida’s legislative reforms, enacted through a series of landmark bills between 2019 and 2023, appear to be achieving their intended effect. More than 17 new property and casualty insurers have entered the Florida market since those reforms were signed into law, drawn by a regulatory environment that has become meaningfully more predictable and a litigation landscape that has been substantially tamed.

The transformation in Florida’s litigation climate has been the most consequential driver. Between 2016 and 2023, Florida accounted for roughly 73% of all homeowner insurance lawsuits in the United States despite representing less than 11% of claims nationally. That extraordinary imbalance made Florida one of the most unprofitable property insurance markets in the country, driving major carriers to restrict coverage, raise rates dramatically, or exit entirely. The 2022 and 2023 reforms directly targeted the mechanisms fueling that litigation, eliminating one-way attorney fees and curbing assignment of benefits abuse. Personal insurance litigation dropped nearly 25% in the first half of 2025 compared to the previous year — a statistic that carries enormous weight in boardrooms when insurers are evaluating market entry decisions.

The financial results have followed. Florida’s domestic property insurers, which lost over a billion dollars in three consecutive years, reported a net positive income in 2023 for the first time since 2016. Rate trends have shifted accordingly. Florida had the lowest average homeowners premium increase in the nation in 2024, at just 1%, while states like Nebraska posted increases of 22.7%. For Miami-Dade homeowners specifically, nearly 75% are now seeing rate reductions on their Citizens policies, a consequence of the state-backed insurer’s aggressive depopulation program that has returned hundreds of thousands of policies to the private market. Across Florida, approximately 3.4 million homeowners are expected to see either a rate decrease or no increase at all at their next renewal.

The competitive dynamic is still evolving. State Farm and Progressive have recommitted to the Florida market, joining newer entrants like Trident Reciprocal Exchange, Viceroy Preferred Insurance Company, and others specifically targeting high-value homes on Florida’s east coast. Critics have noted that some new entrants remain small and relatively untested against a major hurricane season, and that the ultimate proof of the reform era will come when the next significant storm makes landfall. For now, however, the direction is unmistakably positive. Florida homeowners navigating the market can find more information about insurer options and the Citizens depopulation program through the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation.


Why Press Releases Remain One of Florida’s Most Underused Marketing Tools

In a business environment saturated with social media campaigns, paid advertising, and influencer partnerships, many Florida businesses have quietly overlooked one of the most cost-effective visibility tools available to them: the press release. The article makes a direct case that for Florida companies looking to build credibility, improve search engine rankings, and reach audiences beyond their existing customer base, strategic press release distribution through Florida-focused news platforms delivers a return that most other digital marketing channels cannot match at comparable cost.

The core value proposition of press releases in the digital age is the SEO backlink. When a Florida business publishes a press release on authoritative news platforms like FloridaCorporateNews.com or FlBusinessPressReleases.com, each publication creates a high-quality inbound link pointing back to the company’s website. Search engines treat those links as signals of credibility and relevance, lifting the company’s search rankings over time. For Florida businesses competing in high-volume local search categories — plumbing, real estate, law, healthcare, marketing — those incremental ranking improvements translate directly into more inbound calls and leads.

Beyond SEO, press releases create a form of earned media that paid advertising simply cannot replicate. When a business announcement appears in a credible news publication, readers perceive it differently than they perceive an advertisement — it carries an implicit third-party endorsement that builds trust and brand authority. The article notes that Florida businesses in competitive markets benefit disproportionately from this dynamic, because trust is often the deciding factor when a potential customer is choosing between comparable service providers. A law firm, medical practice, or construction company whose name appears consistently across Florida business news platforms occupies a different position in the mind of a prospective client than one with no media presence at all.

The practical advice for Florida businesses new to press release marketing is consistent: start with genuine news, distribute it on platforms reaching your target market, include relevant backlinks, and commit to a consistent cadence rather than expecting a single release to transform results. Platforms like FloridaWebsiteMarketing.com (reachable at 813-409-4683) offer press release writing and distribution services tailored specifically to the Florida market, handling everything from drafting to placement across the state’s network of business news sites. For businesses ready to invest in their digital presence with a strategy that builds compounding value over time, the press release remains as relevant and effective in 2026 as it has ever been.

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