Why Wordpress?

13th Oct '22

What is Wordpress?

Think of Wordpress as a prebuilt structure within which you can build a website; a box into which you can plug your own custom designs and business process requirements. Why would you want to do this? Because Wordpress contains thousands of pre-made features that can be deployed to your website quickly and relatively painlessly.

What features are available in Wordpress?

Wordpress has far too many features to mention in this article, but to summarise some key ones:

Thousands of pre-built website themes (i.e. visual layouts)
In-built content editor
Pre-built forms, such as contact forms
Custom form-builder software
Spam protection
Support with Search Engine Optimisation of your content (SEO)
Shopping Cart and payment processing solutions
Blog post and comment management
Social media widgets
(… just about anything else you can think of)

The Wordpress CMS (wp-admin)

Wordpress comes with a ready-to-use CMS, sometimes called wp-admin. The left-hand sidebar contains links to edit different parts of your site, or change your site’s settings.

In Wordpress it’s straightforward to edit the content of the pages on your website using the editor:

Theming is a powerful tool, which allows virtually any website design to be seamlessly integrated with the wordpress CMS. Plus there are thousands of existing high-quality themes pre-built by software developers that can be either purchased cheaply, or in some cases, used for free.

It should always be possible to edit your page content in this view, unless a site theme has been poorly configured by a software developer.

Should I use Wordpress for my bespoke company website?

In many cases the answer to this question is yes, though not always. To help you make an informed decision, here is a quick list of pros and cons, based on our experience:

Pros	Cons
A vast number of prebuilt features available at no extra cost It’s free to use, though you will still need to pay a web developer to build your site using it It’s widely used, and unlikely to disappear anytime soon It will save you time with your initial website build Custom plugins can be made to manage your company’s unique data requirements	It can relatively slow compared to a site built purely out of HTML and CSS, especially if its a large site with many “moving pieces” It’s not suitable for complex bespoke data applications. A more flexible framework such as Symfony or Laravel would be more suitable for this. It requires regular updates to stay secure Maintenance can become time-consuming as sites grow larger Changing plugin behaviour to meet a very precise requirement can sometimes be tricky and needlessly time-consuming

Pros

Cons

A vast number of prebuilt features available at no extra cost
It’s free to use, though you will still need to pay a web developer to build your site using it
It’s widely used, and unlikely to disappear anytime soon
It will save you time with your initial website build
Custom plugins can be made to manage your company’s unique data requirements

It can relatively slow compared to a site built purely out of HTML and CSS, especially if its a large site with many “moving pieces”
It’s not suitable for complex bespoke data applications. A more flexible framework such as Symfony or Laravel would be more suitable for this.
It requires regular updates to stay secure
Maintenance can become time-consuming as sites grow larger
Changing plugin behaviour to meet a very precise requirement can sometimes be tricky and needlessly time-consuming

In short, Wordpress may be a near-perfect choice, or a bad one; it depends on your bespoke business requirement.

Discuss your Wordpress development requirements with Cardiff Web Support

Whatever your business need, we'll be able to offer a reliable solution at a reasonable cost. With over 15 years in the business, we've successfully helped clients ranging in size from multi-nationals down to individuals. Every project is important to us, and our greatest joy is in listening carefully to the client and designing and engineering a solution that meets theit needs.

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