Wordpress

Why We Use WordPress

Posted in: Wordpress by chris on October 27, 2010

WordPress Mug40Digits is a WordPress shop. Unless a client needs a full-blown e-commerce solution, we are going to build their site on top of WordPress. We made a decision earlier this year to use the WordPress platform for all our projects. Since we get the “Why WordPress?” question a lot, we thought it would be helpful to share some of our thinking.

What is it?

WordPress was born as a blogging platform where people could easily create and publish their own blog. Through the help of an open-source community it has evolved and expanded to a full-fledged content management system (CMS). WordPress.com still exists as an easy-to-use platform for DIYers wanting to set up and publish their own blog. There is also the open-source branch of WordPress (WordPress.org) where you can install and run the WordPress platform on your own server — that’s the sandbox we play in.

Why We’re WordPress Junkies

There are four primary reasons why we use WordPress as our CMS platform.

  1. Flexibility
  2. Extensibility
  3. Reliability
  4. Usability

Flexibility

Before the acronym CMS was derived, websites were either hand-coded page-by-page or web teams built their own home-grown database systems to help manage content and other aspects of a site. With WordPress, all the heavy-lifting is baked in to the platform through features and functions that can easily be incorporated into a new site with just a little bit of PHP experience. We can not only build sites faster, they are more functional and usable by our clients and their customers. This allows us to focus more of a client’s budget on design and user experience than programming and debugging.

Extensibility

<strong>ex-ten-si-ble</strong> <em>[ik-sten-suh-buhl]</em> (adjective)
Capable of being extended.

The WordPress framework is not only lightweight and fast, but is built in a way that allows us, and the giant WordPress community, to tie directly into its functionality through the use of plugins, pre-built themes, and anything else we can think up. So things that were complicated or time-consuming to build in the past such as integrating RSS feeds, managing forms, or dynamically creating sitemaps for search engines can all be built once and used across any WordPress site. In this regard, WordPress is far ahead of similar platform options.

Reliability

When the coolness of a new website wears off the not-so-sexy considerations become real… How secure is my site? Will this over-sized picture of my cat dressed as Darth Vader crash the site? A good portion of this burden resides with the server and host you are using (a future post), but code does matter. WordPress frequently updates their platform with new versions aimed at new features, bug squashing, and security patches. And it’s as simple as clicking “Auto-Update”. Of course, we still do nightly backups, but its easier to sleep at night knowing there are millions of WordPress sites out there ferreting out any potential issues.


Usability

Finally, all that previous stuff is cool, but if at the end of the day if a CMS is difficult to use by our clients then we are taking a step backwards. The back-office control panel of WordPress is super-simple, intuitive and quite elegant. Even in this space, we can make customizations that further enhance and simplify the experience for clients based on their unique needs. We can show a client how to maintain their own site in an hour or less, empowering them to focus on content and less on learning HTML or a maze of menus any mysterious terms.

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