Why you should build your next website with Wordpress

There are many ways to produce a professional looking website, Wordpress powers a large percentage  of the worlds' websites offering the best mix between features and cost.

There are numerous ways to build a website for your business and these can vary in cost. 

• Page builders
• Content Management Systems
• Hand Coded Solutions

Page builders are generally the lowest cost option if you wish to launch a  website. You would normally have a choice of pre-made templates that you can use that will just require you to upload appropriate images, choose your layout, enter your text and away you go. There are pagebuilders such as Wix and Squarespace that are WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) that takes away al ot of the difficulty regarding design and even have responsive layouts that can change the way that your website will appear based on the device that the site is being viewed upon.

As a web designer, I suppose I should be a bit snooty about Wix as a platform but generally for aesthetics, if you have a small budget and basic requirements Wix is a a vaible option. 

The success or failure of a website is based on more than how it looks and some design knowledge is needed to produce a completed design that doens't look like all of the other templates. Expect to pay in the region of £130-£150 per year for a website on these platforms and bear in mind they are not portable (you cannot just change supplier)

Content Management Systems such as WordPress, Joomla or Drupal are the next step up. The base product comes with some templates and blogging flexibility that you world expect with the pagebuilder products but it also has the ability to add additional funtionality such as membership or e-commerce by the use of plugins. Wordpress is by far the best supported of the pagebuilders and boasts a plethrora of free themes, plugins and community support. Visual page builders such as WP Bakery and Elementor enable you the same creative freedom that you would get with something like Wix, but offers a less limited product that can be extended by the use of free, premium or custom built plugins. 

 You will need a certain type of hosting for a Wordpress website but most hosts offer a hosting package with Wordpress install for around £10 per month. Design services are ususally extra if you want the site to look or behave in a different way.

Page builders and Content Management Systems have an awful lot of code just to cover all of their off-the-shelf features and these may be too much for some. The alternative is to have a website hand coded that only provded the features you want. There is some wisdom in this. The resultant website will generally be light-weight and less prone to code bloat, but as evrything is being hand coded from scratch, they can take longer to build and this makes them more costly to design. To put this into perspective, a basic instance of WordPress can be installed and up and running in less than an hour.  Hand coding a solution may take significantly longer. Maintaining a hand coded site requires specialist knowledge which may be beyond most small business owners. Retaining a developer even for the most simple changes may turn out to be very expesnive in the long run.

Content Management systems offer the best mix of support, ease of use, cost to maintain and expandability. Your site will be portable and so if you want to change your host, developer for whatever reason then your site can be moved without having to be redesigned.  WordPress is the king of Content Managment Systems, it is trusted to run billions of websites, has an active support community and is getting better and better all of the time.  

If you are looking to build your next website, my advice is to give WordPress a go. 

For help, advice or even to discuss your website requirements, you can contact me here