The world of business moves quickly. With the technology available today customers expect quality products and services as soon as possible and at a low cost. The demand for a website is no different. What is the best course of action when faced with the challenge of building a new site or updating an old one? Should you have it hard-coded, use a DIY solution, or hire a developer that specializes in a content management system?
Your Options At A Glance
Not too long ago building a website meant knowing how to code in PHP, HTML, CSS, and Javascript, which resulted in sites that took a long time to build, were often limited in features, and came at a high cost. Updating content meant sending a request to the developer, waiting your turn in line, and being charged for the time it took to make the change. This often resulted in websites that had stale content almost from the moment they were launched.
Fast forward to the recent surge of DIY websites that require little to no coding knowledge, can be built rather quickly, and are usually offered at an affordable price. The trade-off, however, is that they are very restricted when it comes to design, resulting in many websites that have a very similar look. These websites also tend to constrain users in where and how their content is displayed on a page. This can often result in the businesses becoming frustrated by these roadblocks they encounter and either accepting what they have or looking for another solution.
In between these two options are the content management systems (CMS) like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. These offer an affordable solution with limited coding required, more choice in design, and the ability to manage the content and add features after the initial launch of a website. Here at ThirdSide we are partial to WordPress.
Why Choose A CMS?
When most people hear WordPress they immediately think of themes, as WordPress themes are immensely popular. WordPress does have an enormous library of ready-to-use themes available, both free and for a modest price. However, we build WordPress websites with frameworks rather than themes because the resulting websites are faster, more secure, and have a more unique design than those built on themes.
There are other benefits to having a website built on a content management system like WordPress for your business. The time to fully deploy a new website is relatively short compared to a hard-coded site. The content can be updated fairly easily by way of a dashboard that is very similar to a word-processing application. New features and functionality can be added to the site in the future with little effort. And the fairly recent hyper-focus on SEO has prompted a whole arsenal of easy-to-use add-ons that provide assistance with optimizing a website for search engines.
In addition to the technical advantages of websites built on WordPress, the popularity of the platform has enabled an entire support community of users and developers to emerge as a resource to answer questions about the WordPress content management system. Not only is this community an advantage to users and developers; it is also beneficial to businesses whose websites are built on WordPress. There will likely always be someone nearby who can provide assistance with those sites.
Final Thoughts
In the end, the choice you make when building a new website needs to fit your business model as well as your budget. Although their numbers are dwindling, there are still plenty of businesses who take a completely hands-off approach and hire a developer to custom code their entire website. And there are plenty of people who choose DIY solutions, especially when they are working with constrained budgets. But for modest budgets, it’s hard to beat the convenience and flexibility of using a content management system. Especially in the long term, it might just be one of the smartest investments you could make.
