Zac Gordon
writes on March 14, 2014
(Photo by William Hook/Flickr)
You can create powerful, polished sites with WordPress without learning a lot of coding. Once you’re comfortable with WordPress, you can do in a week or a weekend what could take you a month or more to code from scratch. The WordPress software, once installed on a server, provides a ton of tools for building and managing great websites.
WordPress works best for certain types of sites. Personal portfolios, blogs, and brochure sites, for instance, are super-easy with WordPress. Thanks to well-developed WordPress plug-ins, you can also easily build e-commerce sites, job boards, social networks and other custom sites. More developers are even talking about using WordPress as an application framework; however, this is a less-developed use case for WordPress at the moment.
When Should I Use WordPress?
For super-simple websites, WordPress is an overkill. It’s better to code from scratch by using a simpler CMS like Perch or a lightweight development tool like Jekyll. You can learn how to make a website from scratch on Treehouse.
For complex sites that require too much bending, tweaking and hacking to make WordPress a viable solution, you should explore building the site from the ground up, likely relying on JavaScript and back-end programming languages like PHP or Ruby.
Most website creators using WordPress today run basic sites, those with static pages, a blog or news section, some sort of custom content, and a variety of common features like slideshows, contact forms, and more. WordPress plug-ins handle those features with no problems. It has the ability to create custom content and assign them your own fields and options. This helps when your content doesn’t fit into the default title and content options that WordPress offers for blog posts and static pages. Unless your theme comes with custom content by default, you will have to activate a few plug-ins and do some template coding to include custom content on your WordPress site.
Related Reading: Learn the Types of Hooks in WordPress
Using Themes in WordPress
Themes make it easy to pass as a professional designer from the start. Themes exists in the thousands upon thousands and so many of them are beautiful, well-supported and cover the gambit of common web industries and trends. In fact, working solely developing and selling WordPress themes is a common goal for Treehouse students taking the WordPress Development Track.
When you start building websites with WordPress, you will likely start off customizing themes that you either download for free or purchase from a theme developer or theme marketplace. To properly customize a WordPress theme to suit you or your client, you will likely create a child theme, the preferred method for customizing themes. This involves setting up a new folder in your themes folder into which you copy and paste any files from the main theme you want to customize. This can include the main style.css file or one of the theme PHP files.
When it gets to the point of creating child themes and customizing themes, someone learning to build websites with WordPress needs to come to terms with beginning to learn a little HTML, CSS and even some PHP. Luckily, unlike when building sites from scratch, knowing just a little bit of each of these languages will let you do much of what you will want to in terms of customizing a theme. Since themes, plugins, and WordPress itself do most of the work for you, a little coding goes a long way.
Read also: The Perfect WordPress Inline SVG Workflow
If you learn the basic skills that take you from being able to use WordPress to being able to make WordPress sites from start to finish, you will find yourself in a healthy, happy, and successful marketplace. Watch our trailer for How to Make a Website with WordPress to see how easy it is to get there.
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Thanks for sharing the amazing information! In my opinion WordPress is a great option for small business to build online presence, and I’ve seen many websites built upon it in the past. Over time as business needs various modification, issues can arise when developing the WordPress website.
its very useful article .one can easily understand and chose wordpress
I like this website and tutorials. There always helpful I appreciate it
Thank-you for sharing this interesting post making WordPress websites. Also WordPress is an open source platform and easy to use. There are lot of tutorials available related to WordPress like https://www.wpblog.com, Wpeka.com etc to learn more about WordPress.
The key is choosing the right solution for the project. The obvious advantages of a CMS is the ability for the owner to update content on their own, faster and cheaper build times, and access to a wide range of features without having to hand code advanced functionality. A static site on the other hand makes it easier to implement highly custom designs, will load much faster, will have valid markup, and requires much less maintenance and headache in the long run.
If a client only needs a website with a contact form and won’t be updating the content often, it’s my opinion that a hand-coded site is the way to go. The site can be launched without having to worry about constant updates, deprecated themes and/or plugins, security exploits, etc. and it will have the advantage of faster page load times and easier indexing.
If a client regularly needs to update site content, maintains a blog, or needs an online store or other advanced functionality (without spending a fortune) then a CMS like WordPress is the way to go. Custom designs can be accomplished with a child theme (although slightly hacky methods may need to be used) and caching plugins can be added and configured to maximize performance.
Thanku so much for sharing Informative post with us, I really like your post, I am a software programmer I got some ideas from your blog.
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Thanks for the great knowledge that you have shared with us. I am gonna share this blog to beginners. It will be a great help for beginners they will get good knowledge.
WordPress has gotten a bad rap over the years for various security issues. However, we’ve been developing on the WordPress Platform for years without any major issue. It’s easy to use and easy to train endusers.
I started my initial website with WordPress and found it to be really user friendly and diverse
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I like the idea of plug-ins, but the cons that you state for not using them make sense. I think I may build my website from scratch.
t’s a really useful article for beginners.
Talking about WordPress it essential to remember to keep it up-to-date to the latest version. WordPress is very popular, so it’s a popular target to hackers. Keeping WP sites in a good shape is crucial for WordPress project as a whole.
WordPress results depend 100% on the developer and how good they are. Bad developers create spongy sites with bad features, bad code, and future problems. This is the nature of opening open source products to the world, the price goes down and the quality also. Unless you find a good developer who knows design and what looks good and works your Wp project could be doomed.
I’m new to wordpress, but my favorite part is that I don’t have to try to struggle with all of the code work, css, and responsive design coding. I’ve found it to be very helpful for what I’m trying to accomplish. I love the plugins, themes, ease of use, and the fact that there are so many tutorials on YouTube. I’ve heard that as many as 25% of websites are now built through WordPress. I’m also quite fond of the way my hosting company automatically installed the wordpress program with just a click or two. No College degree required.
WordPress is definitely great for business / corporate websites, and I actually noticed that many businesses are already using WordPress (regardless whether they have a blog attached to it).
Though this article is quite old and WordPress has changed a lot in two years time period.
I am user of WordPress I just love developing my websites on tool templatetoaster. But today I read about space square it seemed interesting to me something out of the box.
Hi Zac,
This might have already been covered but my straight forward view is “Yes” WordPress is a good option. Particularly for Start-Up business owners and SMEs.
Definitely a better option than say Wix. Outside of this thread, WP has great SEO advantages and can be easily adapted without having to always rely on a developer.
But, WordPress sites still have certain limitations compared to bespoke coded and created sites. It really, in my view, comes down to a few simple factors:
(1) How much budget do you have?
(2) How complex are the requirements?
(3) How much time, skills etc. does one have?
So for small to medium sized business owners WordPress is in my view a sensible option.
Over a decade ago, as a total computer language illiterate, I created a website in my free time from scratch using html and css that I learned from library books. It was a very time consuming process. It took about three months or more, but the final product was worth it. For a while. That website is still out there but has not been touched (updated) for years because I have not been keeping up with skills required to do so.
And now I am in the process of making another site. This time I am going to use WordPress through a host. A simple site of a few pages plus blog. No html, css, ftp and the like, just pick a theme, do some alterations, view and publish with easy updating. Blogging, a bit. I hope. WordPress. A good thing. So far it has been fun. Thanks.
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WordPress is one of the greatest platform for creating website or blog. It provides different types of plugins for SEO or Developers need. The blog feature is available free, its great for creating a blog and promote your business.
Nice article and I agree with most of it. What would be more helpful than just the ‘when to use wordpress’ would be a section called ‘when not to use wordpress’. It can be a very limiting CMS when trying to integrate third party services. Modifications (plugins) are often expensive to purchase and even more expensive to modify to suit specific needs vs just programming it from scratch the first time. End users often have trouble finding where to make the smallest of changes when a programmer buries everything in 3rd party plugins. The list is long. As well, I’d speak to the technical cons of the WordPress platform. A few come to mind very quickly. The CMS likes to auto update. There is almost always a conflict on sites with large amounts of plugin dependencies. A plugin breaks and you don’t know how to modify it, then what? That part or function of your site is now down indefinitely. And then these plugins, how many sites have you known that go down due to hacking because of the lack of attention to security risks the programmers took while building the plugins. While WP is great for beginners, It should not be used for commercial setups.
Regards
Brant Wellons
Honestly, I like the idea of plug-ins, but the cons that you state for not using them make sense. I think I may build my website from scratch.
Astra
I have outgrown my current website http://www.forever-baby.co.uk that keeps crashing and am in need of a major re design to stay inline with high demand in customers – however my web designer is leaning me towards wordpress (right now i have opencart)for him to build will this be good enough and easy for me to get used to? i have been advised to have a website custom built but i guess it wont be as easy as wordpress to get used to unless i was a web designer.
advice would be much appreciated.
I really need a frank answer on this should i use wordpress to display my idea on net by using it to make website or should i learn to code first and then try making a website through coding.
It depends on where you want to go with this. Is this just a one-off website or blog, or are you thinking of doing many websites? Ultimately all websites are made up of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and any framework like WordPress will generate those, If you are really serious about doing websites, perhaps professionally, then you definitely need to learn and understand the underlying HTML/CSS/JS that make up a website. If it’s just a one-off then WordPress is fairly easy to learn, but even that may be overkill, since there are plenty of free templates where you just fill in the words and images you want, and you’re up and running.
WordPress is the new AOL of throwing up websites. Unless your young, you remember when AOL was so bad but people loved it. At one point regular folks thought the only way you could get on the internet. AOL had a modified version of IE that sucked. WordPress is that AOL of today. So many new designers and non professional developers think that’s the only way you can build a website. Scary. Because of the new generation of web designers it’s multiplying like crazy. Bad for the internet.
I could write an encyclopedia volume on why WordPress is worse than any other choice for building a website. Unfortunately, like AOL, people don’t know anything else. If you started with wordpress it’s obvious you are not a web developer and would’t know why every other way of buildings better.
Somebody commented they like wordpress because their client liked the management interface. We have been building much easier to use client interfaces to manage websites since the mid 1990’s, long before some geniuses decided to use blogging software to make websites.
I do like Zac’s article because it’s unbiased and spot on. Other than that save the internet and stop using slow memory intensive off the shelf blogging software to build every damn site on the internet. Before somebody says it’s not that slow I realize you can run caching plugins or specialized hosting platforms that invest in heavy hardware to run the beast that is WordPress. My question to the WP fan boys is what other method to render a basic dynamic web pages uses the amount of resources as WordPress on a request?
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I started my initial website with WordPress and found it to be really user friendly and diverse. However, I think it’s specific to the industry that you are working in. As a photographer, I found behance and prosite to be better suited to my work as they cater to portfolio type showcasing. Interesting read nonetheless! Thanks!
Regards,
Nicole Sarah Photography
http://www.nicolesarah.com
WordPress can be overkill for some projects, for example, a simple flower shop with only 3 different pages.
However I’ve found that the majority of my projects require WordPress purely for the blog functionality. Which is a problem in itself since it’s so well known and used it can be hard to pursuade people to use something simpler, mainly because simpler is different.
WordPress just keeps getting better and better. It’s far from perfect at this point but I wouldn’t dream of using anything else, for so many reasons…
I’ve been using WordPress for clients for over 6 years now and have only built a few sites outside of the WordPress framework.
The thing I like BEST about WordPress is that my clients can manage most parts of the site on their own (or I can provide video tutorials that walk them through the step-by-steps so they feel in control of their site). I’ve worked with so many clients who have used Joomla and are lost on how to change things and update the framework.
I’m happy to recommend WordPress to almost any client looking to build a simple to semi-complex site.
Good article! I think WordPress is a great option for small business to build a web presence, and I’ve recommended and implemented many websites built upon it in the past. Over time as business needs change, issues can arise when working within the WordPress architecture when it comes to building in functionality which only grows. The WordPress plugin community (free and paid) is very accommodating to meet your needs, however we often found it easier to move to a custom CMS and more lightweight solution. WordPress has grown up into a fully fledged and very capable CMS which is so much more attractive than Drupal or Joomla. However, a few years after I started jumping straight to WordPress to build the company website, I’m now jumping to Node.js and working with Express.js because it’s so lightweight and a lot faster than WordPress, albeit the the learning curve is a lot steeper, and there’s no code free setup (yet). Ghost is the new kid on the block from ex-Wordpress folks that presents the most credible threat to WordPress itself, and I expect to see Ghost hosting more websites as it’s capabilities grow. All that said, if a company asks were to ask me what to do, I’ll still say WordPress is great for getting started today, but keep your eye on the horizon and keep in mind their needs may change tomorrow.
wordpress has its uses, and is suitable for some website designs, but some times it is a bit over kill
Yeah, sometimes all you need is just a simple static site generator like Jekyll.
WordPress is fantastic however, if my boss asks me for my opinion on CMS, we have a good budget, good timescale and we are able to complete it, I always suggest building our own CMS.
That being said, not every team can build out the CMS due to resources, cost and timescales.
WordPress is a tool and should be treated as one and not a Grab-It-Off-The-Shelf solution, you get what you make from it and if you understand it fully or at a comprehensive level then you can pretty much do anything with it.
Great judgment is require though to ensure that you’re not just selecting it for convenience, if the project warrants Drupal or a custom spec … then do the work.
RockOn WordPress!
Hi Zach in my experience I’ve used WordPress for any sites that have needed a CMS. Some of them have been very complex websites with the of using the multisite feature, they needed to share content and overriding content on other sites. This needed to be very bespoke to the client, I could of started a website from scratch but I still think that WordPress was the right system to use. The advances you get from the helper functions, actions and filters and easy to use CMS just makes it the perfect solution for any site that needs a CMS. I’ve also explored the option of creating more complex sites in Drupal, Umbraco and Sitecore, but they haven’t been as easy to use as WordPress is. What I’m trying to say is just because a site is complex doesn’t mean you should discard WordPress.
I agree. I am a beginner at WordPress and Web Design overall (around 6 months into serious time commitments to learning all this stuff), and it seems that WordPress could really itch whatever scratch you would need for building a website. I could definitely see where WordPress may not be all that helpful for basic static sites (like a local shop website or something). I am nearly addicted to WordPress at the moment, but it might be overkill in some cases.