WORDPRESS DEVELOPMENT

The WordPress administration / back end is intuitive and simple to use. Whether you’re a beginner or seasoned website and content manager, administering websites are straightforward – provided your development team has built your site well and set it up for ease of use! The user interface is simple and managing content, menus, users, SEO, orders, customers, members (depending on business) is easy.

“Open source” means the source code is publicly available and free. This is true for WordPress, and means that the platform has a global community of users and developers. Such a community means that WordPress has enjoyed contributions from developers all over the world for many years, and there is little functionality – in the form of extensions and plugins – which does not exist “off the shelf” now in some form.

WordPress can be used for micro sites and landing pages through to enterprise-level business websites. The extensive plugins available in part make this possible, but also the granular control and ability for developers to script and build custom functionality means that powerful systems can be built from the ground up, on top of the base CMS code. Learn more about Headless WordPress.

Although not a dedicated eCommerce system, with its high level of flexibility WordPress can be customised for many commercial purposes. For more traditional retail-oriented purposes the Woocommerce extension is an excellent option, but also a huge range of plugins exist to manage memberships, paid content, events, donations and all manner of product or service based business.

Off the shelf themes and plugin page builders such as Divi (our preference) now mean that more power is placed in the user’s hands to create layouts and designs – and manage pages and content – without necessarily having coding and development skills. These solutions do come with some caveats however – they are not always the best solution and should be considered against business requirements.

WordPress, although exceptionally flexible, customisable and powerful, it is not always the ideal platform and other CMS or frameworks may be better suited for your project. See our Craft and Laravel pages for some background on other techology alternatives. There’s some additional considerations: it’s very important to keep WordPress websites maintained regularly for performance and security reasons; only reputable and widely used plugins and themes should be used; no custom development should occur without ensuring it’s independent of WordPress core and other plugins (otherwise it’s likely future breakages will occur) so best-practice coding should be employed; and although WordPress core is free, there are license costs associated with most reputable plugins.