WordPress website development is our preferred method for creating affordable, professional and editable websites.

It is a very popular system and has developed over the years into a powerful interface that has endless plugins, and very good capabilities for most web-based business applications. For a small business, or a company wanting their very first website, WordPress is a viable option, and for the price, can offer a lot of ‘bang-for-your-buck’.

As well as WordPress website development, there are other popular interfaces we can work with. These include Joomla, Drupal, Magento and A-Shop Ecommerce. We have produced websites in each of these systems, and depending on your needs we may recommend one of these systems as an alternative to WordPress. It may be because one of these has features or plugins available that exactly match your requirements.

As a company we had have a lot of experience with WordPress, we have had both negative experiences, and positive experiences. We have compiled a list of ‘pros and cons’ based on our first-hand experience with this (and similar) interfaces as a way to be open and honest about using WordPress to build a website. We feel by being open about these factors, we can be best prepared to avoid any negative situations that can occur with WordPress.

(For more info about WordPress website development, read our blog entry: What is WordPress you ask?)

Pros and Cons of building a WordPress based website

Pros

• Generally less upfront cost – all WordPress websites start with a ‘theme’ that lessens the need to code a website from scratch. The theme is edited and customised to make it turn into a new website.
• Lots of plug-ins – a range of plugins that can enhance your website are available and produced regularly.
• Pre-built E-commerce integration options – there are existing themes that have E-commerce built into them. This can save on integrating merchant facilities with websites, although these are generally designed for PayPal as a default. Custom bank merchant integration will still have to be done if you intend on using an Australian ‘big 4’ merchant facility.
• Responsive coding has started to be a ‘standard’ part of most new themes. This means they will resize to fit the resolution of the browser that is being displayed, for example on your mobile phone, iPad, or any device that may be used for internet browsing.

Cons

• Because WordPress is such a popular interface, it is targeted by hackers and scammers more often. This means you need to stay on top of security updates, and make sure website and server maintenance is performed regularly.
• Complicated content management system. Compared to a custom designed CMS, a WordPress CMS has its challenges when you are first using it, you have to be prepared to sit through tutorials, and online walk-throughs in order to edit your website.
• Poor WYSIWYG Editor – WordPress’ editor (text controller) TinyMCE has got a lot better over the years, but it still can manipulate and mutilate the HTML code and generates a lot of extra coding that is not necessarily needed.
• Load time is slower than hand coded websites – due to the nature and complexity of how a WordPress site is coded. It can mean slower load time, which can affect user interest and is also considered bad for SEO.

If you are interested in finding out more about what system you should have your website built on, please talk to a website consultant and we will help you. We also create hand coded custom designed websites.