Should I Use WordPress?

By: Jason Craig on Feb 5, 2011 | No Comments

Should I Use WordPress?

WordPress seems to be ever growing in popularity, not only as a blogging platform but a full CMS (Content Management System).  It can be adapted for many needs and we will be focusing on using it as a CMS in this post.

One of the notable things WordPress isn’t really up to par yet is running an e-commerce site.  We’ve seen templates that were created for use on WordPress with their own cart system built in.  The obvious downside to this is if you have little or no programming knowledge, changing the way your cart functions is going to cost you.  There are plugins which we’ve worked with before (WP E-Commerce), however they either seem to be lacking features or still have a significant amount of bugs.  If you’re looking to run an e-commerce site, you would be better served using an e-commerce script like we’ve discussed in brief here.

Now on to what we’re really here for, is WordPress right for you?

Should I Use WordPress?

If you are setting up a blog and want a solid, widely supported, SEO friendly product right out-of-the-box, you can’t go wrong with WordPress.  With free themes and thousands of free plugins available, creating something unique takes very little programming knowledge, if any at all.

Let’s look at a different scenario.  Perhaps you have a website already live?  Maybe it is a static website, meaning the content stays the same until you or someone else with programming knowledge goes in and modifies the website files for you.  Not only is that time consuming but it can be costly, again dependent on your programming knowledge.

But there is hope!  Perhaps your website is coded in HTML and it’s been live for years and many people have become familiar with it.  Creating a new template may not be the best choice, it just depends on your particular scenario and needs.  In this case we’ll want to keep our current theme in place because our visitors have come to recognize it as a direct representation of us personally.

What we at BlueLayerMedia and I’m sure many other have done, is take your current HTML site and re-code it to work with WordPress.  Without going in to too many boring specifics, we insert PHP in replace of some of your HTML code which in turn can give you control over what is displayed on your site via WordPress.  A perfect example of this is on the font page of your website.  No one wants to see the same content over and over again.  In replace of your static textual paragrap, we’ll insert the PHP code that controls the display of posts via WordPress.  Now you can update your posts on the front page of your website as often as you want without having to hire anyone to update your site or learn HTML yourself.

Should I Use WordPress?

There are many other aspects of your site that can be controlled via WordPress such as advertisements, contact pages, opt-in forms, and much more.

If you’re looking to keep your existing theme and want control over the content, WordPress should be a CMS you should consider using.

The cost of porting your site to WordPress will depending on the complexity of your theme as well as how much control you want over the content.

If you’re in the market to start using a CMS and want to see how much it might cost you, feel free to contact us and we’ll help you get started on the right path to website independence.

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