I’m hoping there is a GQ answer for this otherwise mod feel free to move it.
I know there is a certain desire for people to build their own websites. When I looked at Wix a few years ago, it struck me that it was pretty much “Here are 4-5 templates so choose one. Drop pictures in and there you go.” Nowadays, a lot of people are using Wordpress to do the same thing but I know of two cases personally where someone is charging thousands of dollars to a client and building their webpage in Wordpress. From what little I’ve seen:
They do not actually write/program any of the webpage. Oh you want a twitter widget? Let me hit a couple of wordpress widgets.
All of the webpages I’ve seen that I know are Wordpress look very template-driven to me. They loog good yes but they all look the same and like they were made in 2011.
So is Wordpress really template driven? Is it worth $1000s to have someone make a Wordpress website for you? What is the advantage in having a WP site rather than one specially programmed for you?
Wordpress is a content management system. It is not a development platform, although there are a large number of misguided souls who try to use it as such.
I have done a number of websites for clients using wordpress.
We use a combination of templates and custom programming with our own customised layout.
I grow my business based on two different areas
a) easy editing of the finished product (for updating of content)
b) Provision of content - making it as easy as possible for the mid sized enterprise to get a comprehensive website.
Yes, much of what we do does look template driven - but that is to keep the management easy.
the more “arty” the design, the harder it will be for the client to update and manage.
Further, my own philosophy is that it is (or should be) content that drives a website more than anything else.
For what we do - wordpress works really really well…
And as an aside - if anybody seriously wants a corporate / SME website that is simple to manage - the exchange rate in your favour can make what I provide really cheap, :D:p
I’m very familiar with Wordpress and it probably comprises about 50% of all development I have to do. As previously answered, it is a content management system rather than a development platform. You can do as little with it as you want, or as much as you want (almost) as far as customization. You can certainly go online and buy a nice theme, get a few good widgets, and have yourself a very nice website going with little to no coding involved. This is for if you want a site that has pages, a blog, twitter feed, some sliders maybe… a “basic” website.
It costs multiple thousands when you want a site that might as well be built from the ground up using a MVC framework or something, but you want it done in Wordpress. I get this from big clients all the time. A lot of “digital” ad agencies tell their clients they will build them a big custom website for all of their needs and they end up telling the clients it will be a Wordpress site so that they can edit everything, maintain it, use all those widgets, blah blah. Then they contract to a developer who has to bend all the rules of Wordpress to make the functionality happen.
Essentially you can use Wordpress as a “debelopment platform” but it isn’t advisable if you are working with a project that large. You end up with a very hefty bit of custom plugins and a lot of extra theme functionality running on the Wordpress core system. Effectively, you are only using the Wordpress admin interface at that point (and usually that is customized quite a bit by this point too). Most people don’t need this much custom stuff.
The most frequent thing I do is make Wordpress sites into full ecommerce sites. This is requested a lot by agencies for their clients. Wordpress is not a good ecommerce tool, and there are tons of companies out there (Shopify is my favorite) that have all the goodies built in and are as extendable as Wordpress is. Making custom posts, taxonomy groups, ecommerce widgets, custom URL routing, etc. all for what the client wants is a lot of work - and it costs thousands. Any (quality) custom code will always cost a chunk of change, though.
Pros of Wordpress:
solid admin tool
lots of good plugins for in case you don’t want to code (I almost always build my own plugins even if another exists that works… I know I will support my code, but I don’t know if the other developer will)
lots of support materials and a very active user base (aka you can find a fix for your problems on Google very easily)
lots of great looking themes (they don’t have to look the same, you can make a WP theme look like just about anything you want… the themes that look the same is probably because they use bootstrap or some other grid system)
very good at what it was built to do
Cons
you can only customize so much before it starts to be cumbersome
you are sometimes limited by the WP functionality and you end up having to “hack” some solutions together to achieve something you want
it makes up a big percentage of the web, so it is a prime security target - you have to always be up to date on security