WordPress Designer

Think of a content management system (CMS) as a bunch of premade code (open source and free like WordPress or not like Shopify, Webflow) that gives the website structure and helps organise its files quicker. Ultimately, any website or app is just a bunch of code and other files stored on a server, and a CMS simply makes it quicker to create those files and define their interdependencies!

To illustrate this with an example, imagine you know HTML, CSS and JavaScript so that you can do front end development. Now you want to create your website’s home page, which will require HTML, CSS and JavaScript (JS). If you didn’t have a CMS, you would need to create those three files according to the desired design: an HTML file (e.g. home.html), a CSS file (home.css) and a JS file (home.js). In the HTML file, you would specify when to load the CSS and the JS files. You would then open the terminal or some web host management tool (cPanel, Plesk) and upload these files to the root directory of your website (the publicly visible folder that your domain is connected to). And voila, you would have your home page accessible at yourdomain.com/home.html.

But this was for just one static page. Now imagine you want to have a blog. Again, assuming you want to have static content, you need to create folders for each category, create each post as an HTML file, and then link all of them on the blog page. But suppose you want some kind of search and filtering functionality. In that case, you would then also need to write some further JS or scripts (in PHP or another backend language) that would allow assigning tags to posts and filtering according to them. If you then want to remove a post from the blog, you need to find the link to the post you want to remove inside the blog HTML file and remove or replace it.

With a CMS like WordPress, you would just go the “posts” section of your admin panel, create the new blogposts using either the default WordPress editor or a page builder like Elementor, and then that would update wherever you have a blog feed. You could then go to the tags section of your admin panel, add new tags and assign them to blog posts, and enable filtering by those tags on the blog page. If you want to delete blog posts, you would go to the posts page and make that post-draft or delete it, and it would just disappear from everywhere.

So if we assume the simplest designs, it will probably take a day to set up that blog with the custom approach and maybe an hour with WordPress. Add this up over all the different features and also add the time you will spend updating and maintaining the site: using a CMS will save you tons of time and money when creating and maintaining the website. As long as your product is not software that needs to be integrated within your website (e.g. Facebook) for 99% of websites and use cases, it just doesn’t make any financial sense nowadays to build a website from scratch without a CMS.

That said, not all CMSs are created equal either. You get two broad types of CMSs: those built for developers and those built for non-techie users.

The CMSs mainly geared towards developers include Magento, Drupal and Joomla, to name a few. As building a website with these requires some coding work to be done, websites with these CMSs typically take longer to produce, cost more and are generally more challenging for the end client to maintain without the help of a developer.

From a business perspective, it’s most optimal to go for the solutions that are:

1. Fast to develop
2. Affordable to develop and maintain
3. Easy to expand and add new features
4. Easy to market and promote (and this is a big one)

So ideally, you want to have as little custom code as possible as it is more expensive and time-consuming to develop a feature from scratch than it is to use an existing plugin or extension. Furthermore, most of the trusted plugins have a big team that tests the plugin’s compatibility with the rest of the CMS. In contrast, if you develop a feature from scratch, you need to check it regularly to ensure it doesn’t cause conflicts with updates. So going back to the five elements of CMS website development, for a CMS to be the most optimal solution from a business perspective, it needs to have:

1. The CMS itself – a CMS that is very multifunctional and advanced
2. Themes and plugins – a big directory of themes from a variety of providers
3. Page builder – a variety of advanced page builders
4. Custom code – an option to add custom code to the plugins or extensions in a documented fashion
5. Hosting – an ability to easily scale to have more visitors

And WordPress excels at all of these, making it one of the most (if not the most) flexible, cost and time-efficient website development option.

Other CMSs for non-techie users, such as WIX, Squarespace, Webflow and Shopify, also allow to intuitively create pages and quickly get a website up and running. And although WordPress is undoubtedly the all-around winner, some of these other CMSs, such as Webflow and Shopify, still have competitive advantages in some areas. For example, if you would like to have a very animation heavy front end, Webflow may be more suitable. Similarly, if you want a standard e-commerce website with minimal ongoing support, then Shopify may be the choice for you.

We offer WordPress, Webflow and Shopify development services, and we typically recommend the CMS to use based on the project requirements on a case by case basis. If you are wondering which of the three will be most suitable for your project, you can also read:

• Webflow development
• Shopify development
• Webflow vs WordPress
• Shopify vs Woocommerce

Or feel free to book a call, and we can walk you through all of the options depending on your project specification!

Now, let’s finally dive a bit deeper into some of the reasons you may want to use WordPress and why it is the best all-around CMS!