CMS or Custom Website?

The WordPress vs custom website question is an easy one.  Let’s say you’re in Clearwater or Palm Harbor and want to buy a car.  You could go to a Ford, Chevy or Honda dealership in Largo or Dunedin, or you could hire some guy in East Lake who says he’ll build a “custom” car for you from scratch.

Easy choice!  You’ll want to take advantage of the economies of scale, the fact that thousands of engineers have collaborated to build the best product they can and that millions of customers have given feedback – all these things give you great confidence in the pre-made product.

Did you know that the same principle applies to websites?

Instead of makes and models, we call them frameworks and content management systems(CMS).

Does it make sense to hire a web developer to create common routines like contact pages, user registration; login; and lost password routines when these have already been written by other web developers?  Wouldn’t you rather have a well-tested web application that includes collaboration and scrutiny of hundreds of developers, rather than just one – especially when the pre-built functions are free?

Even when you need functions that aren’t available in a web framework, they can be custom-coded and added to the framework  or CMS.

Frameworks (and content management systems) save you money and time, offer fewer bugs, more security, are easier to upgrade and offer much simpler maintainability than a custom-coded website application.  This is especially important if you ever have to change developers.  Many times it is less expensive to start completely over when a new web developer has to take over a non-framework web application.

Frameworks like Laravel, Yii2, CodeIgnighter – these are good for heavy-duty web “applications” as opposed to websites that include applications.  A framework might be used to write a cloud app to run a business on, but they’re not generally a good choice for websites.

CMS’s like Joomla, WordPress and Drupal are very popular, which makes them good choices because you’ll want support and availability of web developers when you need help.

But which CMS is best?  I was a die-hard Joomla and Yii fan for about ten years.  Then WordPress “grew up”.  I now do almost everything with WordPress because it is so powerful, flexible and yet simple.  It is the most widely used CMS and the easiest to find support and developers for.  An added plus is that you can maintain content yourself without needing professional assistance, more easily than with Joomla or Drupal.

Let’s Talk!

If this all makes sense to you, then let’s talk about how we can put your ideas to work for you, starting now.  Why not contact me today? (link)