Why not using Wordpress is a good idea Apr 29th '10

Wordpress is a brilliant piece of software, it allows you to quickly get a fully featured website up and running, including a blog, photo gallery, social media integration and even E-commerce. Wordpress does have a few drawbacks which mean that its not ideal for all sites. Read on to find out when and why you shouldn’t use Wordpress.

Earlier this year, Pingdom released a post on the blog platforms of the top 100 blogs. Wordpress came out top with 27% of the top 100 blogs. This just proves how powerful Wordpress is for a blog, but what about a full website?

Wordpress as a Content Management System

Wordpress is becoming an unofficial standard for creating websites on a budget which can be edited using a Content Management System (CMS). I wrote a post last year about the need for a Content Management System which mentioned Wordpress as a CMS. Ask any designer, whether print or web and Wordpress is bound to have come up in conversation as part of a full site.

Wordpress is brilliant, sometimes

Let me say that Wordpress is brilliant. We still use it for many customers sites which lend themselves to the features that Wordpress can offer. Wordpress gives the designer the power to create truly beautiful sites with all the power and control of Wordpress. So how is Wordpress bad?

Wordpress starts falling down if you don’t have any knowledge of HTML and/or CSS. The knowledge isn’t needed to make changes but it is certainly needed if the changes don’t go as well as you thought they might go. Many, many (many!) times we have been contacted by clients who have made a change to their Wordpress site which has broken the formatting or layout of the page and it needs fixing. Most of the time it is a small fix in the code, however without knowledge of HTML, the client can’t fix it. The main reason for this is if the site isn’t integrated properly, with proper separation of the content and the layout, the site becomes a nightmare to maintain.

Now before people jump on that last comment and come at me with pitchforks and torches, let me clarify.

If done right Wordpress sites are manageable however they still offer too much control and power for a client who doesn’t want the hassle. In these cases a custom or alternative CMS would suit but it all depends on the clients needs.

What do you think, is giving too much control and power to a website owner a bad thing?

Written by Oliver Culverhouse

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