I hate it when I hear 'bespoke cms', it's a word that should give companies and individuals looking for a new website designer a sense of foreboding and dread. What it means is that in 2, 3 or 5 years down the road when you want to move your website or have someone else manage it for you, you'll have to start from scratch again, as 'bespoke' generally means 'not portable', or in the slim instances where is is portable you then have the added stress of finding a competent programmer who can decipher the original programmers code and work with it. There's the added grip of not having the latest plugins or features seemingly available to your completion in the marketplace.
I love
Wordpress! There, I've said it out loud and proud. Wordpress, in my opinion, is one of the best open source content management systems and website frameworks out there today. It's relatively easy to design and build with, it's open-source, widely supported and portable. It allows both web designers, web developers and the end user to create and maintain a site that performs well, can be responsive and adaptable to the end users needs. Over 30% of the worlds' websites are built using Wordpress and it's increasing all the time.
Some people say Wordpress sites all look the same. Not true. This is where us web designers and developers come into our own. The idea is that Wordpress isn't a constraint to design but the framework - and with clever thinking, great design and a structured approach you can create a website that is both functional and graphically stimulating and more importantly different to other sites sharing off the shelf templates.
I recently designed the
www.hawkins-solicitors.com website. They required a website that portrayed their professional but friendly approach to their legal services and also offered them the ability to add, edit and delete pages, update the site with additional news, service pages and staff bios - something that their current 'bespoke cms' didn't allow them to do without incurring additional charges from their current host.
Using Wordpress allowed me to open up their website to them allowing them as much control as they wanted over the content. I used custom post types to manage staff biographies and services, Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugins to create custom page areas and features and flexible templates to create a site that certainly doesn't look like your standard Wordpress 'blog' layout and creates a professional, corporate website with expansive cms-managed content. Integrated with Google Analytics and
Code Guard (for automated back-ups it delivers the full package! A bonus with Wordpress is that it's relatively easy to refresh the site branding / theme at a later date.
I firmly believe in creating websites that give content control back to the end user - should they wish to use it. I also advocate that the client (with my help) sets up their own hosting account and Google analytics account. Far too many times have I had clients say they don't have access to this element or that service. By giving the client all their own accounts it just makes what I do simpler and they have peace of mind that, should they ever need to, moving their account or changing their web designer will be much more straight forward.
