Questions to consider when picking a CMS for your website
WordPress is an incredibly popular content management system (CMS). WordPress offers a free and flexible environment for creating and managing a website. WordPress easy access to website functionality through the use of plugins and high end design through the use of themes makes it a very viable choice for most users looking to create a new website. This doesn’t necessarily mean that WordPress is a fit for every situation. We’ve found that there is a certain amount of functionality that can be needed or desired which would make a more custom system like our Robintek CMS a better fit for our clients.
So how do you know if WordPress is the best fit for your company’s needs? Here are a couple questions to consider when deciding if WordPress is the right system for your website.
What does your website need to do?
Functionality plays a big role in deciding what CMS your website should be built in. If your website is mainly for marketing and all you would need is a high end design and some simple forms, WordPress is a great choice. However, if you need a website to run a significant portion of your business, then it’s probably time to start considering using a CMS that can support your business custom needs.
WordPress gives you free access to thousands of plugins which are essentially small bits of functionality that you can install and readily use on your website. This is great in most cases but becomes a problem when you need a significant amount of plugins, or if you need a plugin custom built for your website. Each plugin that is installed on a website is most likely built by a separate developer. Which means in a way you are having many separate developers build the pieces of functionality that run your website.
By using a small amount of these to run some more significant portions of functionality on your site, you can actually save a lot of time and money. The big problem comes when you need 20-30 plugins or more to build or obtain the desired functionality of your website. Using a significant amount of plugins increases the chance for an incompatibility issue between them, which will break different portions of your website. It also increases your site’s risk for security vulnerability, since you would essentially have 20-30 different development teams building functionality for your website.
Do you have any special functionality requests?
WordPress’s flexible environment and easy access to plugins makes it easy to build just about any kind of website. However this flexibility can become a hindrance if there are specific bits of functionality you desire for your website. Plugins as a whole are made for and served to a mass market. So the way they are built tends to be a one size fits all blanket approach that may not include everything you want out of your website’s functionality. It’s important to properly vet WordPress and any plugins that are going to be used to make sure all of your special requests for functionality can be met. Otherwise it may be wise to consider a more custom system that can guarantee your special requests are included.
