I love WordPress. I will usually suggest it as a CMS over Joomla and Drupal because of the true elegance of its design, the intuitive nature of the administration area for clients, its superiority (especially with All-In-One SEO pack) over all of the others for SEO. In fact his site is powered by WordPress.
Initially a blog software more and more sites (even large enterprise sites) are choosing it as their Web site CMS of choice.
Unfortunately there is a downside to this that is just now becoming apparent. WordPress is free, easy to install, and there are thousands of available free and low cost templates. For the most part just about anyone can get a WordPress site or blog up and running on their own. That’s the good news.
The problem actually comes when estimating the cost of customized design, customizing plugins etc. – In short, the very client who just saved a lot of money on functionality that would have run into the tens of thousands (or more) back when the functionality had to be custom built is loath to spend much at all on customization. The customer assumes that the software that does so much for nothing must only need a few tweaks to get it to look and behave exactly the way they envision. Sometimes that’s true – more frequently its not.
This issue is not restricted to clients using WordPress – customizations are even more complicated with Joomla. I recently developed a Joomla site that had so many tweaks and customizations that in the end it might have been wiser to have built a completely custom site.
(As an aside) Many of these customizations will also affect the ability to easily upgrade the main software as well as plugins and components.
WordPress and the Devaluing of Custom Web Design
I love WordPress. I will usually suggest it as a CMS over Joomla and Drupal because of the true elegance of its design, the intuitive nature of the administration area for clients, its superiority (especially with All-In-One SEO pack) over all of the others for SEO. In fact his site is powered by WordPress.
Initially a blog software more and more sites (even large enterprise sites) are choosing it as their Web site CMS of choice.
Unfortunately there is a downside to this that is just now becoming apparent. WordPress is free, easy to install, and there are thousands of available free and low cost templates. For the most part just about anyone can get a WordPress site or blog up and running on their own. That’s the good news.
The problem actually comes when estimating the cost of customized design, customizing plugins etc. – In short, the very client who just saved a lot of money on functionality that would have run into the tens of thousands (or more) back when the functionality had to be custom built is loath to spend much at all on customization. The customer assumes that the software that does so much for nothing must only need a few tweaks to get it to look and behave exactly the way they envision. Sometimes that’s true – more frequently its not.
This issue is not restricted to clients using WordPress – customizations are even more complicated with Joomla. I recently developed a Joomla site that had so many tweaks and customizations that in the end it might have been wiser to have built a completely custom site.
(As an aside) Many of these customizations will also affect the ability to easily upgrade the main software as well as plugins and components.
from → internet commentary, web design