Scott Design

WordPress is a great platform for creating your blog, but should you create your entire website using WordPress? Having created both blogs and entire sites on WordPress before, we’ve learned that there are some good reasons to use WordPress to create your website, and some good reasons to use another solution.

Here’s a quick rundown of the good, the bad, and our experience using WordPress to create websites.

Software: Frequent upgrades, plenty of plug-ins, large user base

• Good: WordPress is an open-source project and there are plenty of developers, so security flaws get patched quickly and new features and plug-ins appear regularly. The large, helpful community of users can help you fix problems. If you’ve had the problem, chances are, someone else has too.
• Bad: Plug-ins can sometimes stop working when you upgrade WordPress to the latest version. Since plug-ins are often developed by individuals, mostly volunteers, fixes aren’t always done immediately.

Functionality: Built-in search, search engine optimization (SEO)

• Good: WordPress has a built-in search function and facilitates SEO. The search function is easily added to all pages of your site. WordPress allows you to tag all contents, create custom keyword-rich URLs, and allow trackbacks and pingbacks, all of which help your site to be found in online searches.
• Bad: WordPress search is limited — results are sorted by date, not relevance, and there are no advanced searching options. For a more robust search function, you should install Google Site Search on your WordPress website.

Platform: Based on PHP and MySQL

• Good: Allows experienced developers to completely customize sites.
• Bad: Not as easy to customize for non-developers or those who know only HTML. WordPress has its own PHP syntax and functions that create a bit of a learning curve, even for experienced PHP coders. Also, you can’t just preview a post in your browser without having a WordPress testing server set up.

Design: Plenty of templates

• Good: Even if you don’t hire a designer to customize your site, there are enough templates so your site won’t look like everyone else’s site.
• Bad: The templates are not designed to further your brand. You may find one that is similar to your current branding, but it won’t match exactly. You might want to start with a simple template, which takes care of a lot of the drudge work of setting up the site. Then, to customize the template to match your branding, you definitely should be (or hire) a web designer/developer. If you want to make some pages in your site look significantly different from a regular “blog” structure, you will need to spend a lot of time working with style sheets and PHP.

Updates: Content Management System (CMS)

• Good: Can be used as a simple CMS, and it is relatively standards-compliant. Adding new content doesn’t require much training and there are many plug-ins you can use to add CMS functionality to your site.
• Bad: With some work, you can turn WordPress into a CMS, but WordPress is not really a full-featured CMS. For example, WordPress won’t keep you from introducing bad code if you use Word to write your posts instead of WordPress. It also doesn’t do workflow management or track user roles.

Overall, creating a website with WordPress is straightforward, especially if you are happy with an existing template.  However, if you want to customize the look and functionality of the template, you’ll need to have robust web development skills, or hire a developer.

It’s important to keep in mind what WordPress does well, and what it does only with great effort, so you can have realistic expectations from the beginning. As long as you want your site to leverage WordPress’s strengths, such as blogging, posting frequent updates, and sorting by date or alphabetically, WordPress is a good way to go. But if you’re looking for a straight CMS, highly customized page layouts, but few of the blogging features of WordPress, you’d probably be better off going with a straight CMS solution, not WordPress.

For a look at a website that Scott Design created entirely in WordPress, visit the CTW website.

What would you add to this list?

Tags: blog, web design, web development, wordpress

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 14th, 2010 at 11:35 am and is filed under Technology . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.