WordPress VS. Website Development From Scratch
Alright, you have made up your mind that you want a website. This could be for an e-commerce store, a blog, a site for your business, or a new online business idea that you have. Now it’s time to think of all of the components that you want to be involved with this website. Picture how it’s going to be laid out and every little design aspect you can think of. Well first things first, you are no professional designer. There are many ways you can go about getting a website. You can use a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, or hire a web developer. There are also website builders, but we’ll talk about those at another time. There are many different reasons on why you would want to use WordPress or hire a developer to build it from scratch. Lets go over those.
WordPress
Like I said before, WordPress is a content management system that can be used to build websites. Back in the day, it was mainly just used to create little personal blogs. But now, it powers and manages huge sites with many different variations. It is no baby CMS. There are thousands of plugins that you can use to add different aspects to your site including building forms, security, search engine optimization and social media sharing.
How it starts is you download WordPress files, create a user, and generally you pick a theme for your site. There are thousands of themes to choose from and some even have a bunch of different variations to them. Generally, these themes are very versatile to where you can change almost everything on them, but some aren’t. From choosing a theme, you would them do a lot of design work if needed.
WordPress is great for people that don’t have a vast knowledge of coding and a good eye for design. Realistically you don’t need ANY coding or programming experience. But it’s good to have web and computer knowledge when creating sites because there’s so many terms and phrases and backend nightmares that may happen. Ask any web developer and they will tell horror stories about spending many late nights on no sleep to figure out why the site is throwing errors in some areas. In conclusion, WordPress is a great tool to build a website for people with no coding experience. It generally doesn’t take that long and is relatively inexpensive.
Website Development From Scratch
There could be many different reasons why you would want your site built from scratch. There could be different development issues you want to work through. You want it built a very specific way that cannot be accomplished on WordPress. It’s going to be more of a program than a website. It holds many different algorithms for users. etc. In this case, you need to a hire a developer, because let’s face it, you aren’t going to build it. Right away, developing from scratch is going to take a lot of time and a lot of money. These developers have to start from the ground up. It’s important to shop around for the right developer. In this case, it PAYS to PAY. Don’t go for the cheapest developer because development takes skill. It’s like cooking. Either you’re good at it or you are trash. So if a developer gives you a quote thats 200% under the next nearest bid, that should throw red flags. Also, take a look at their portfolio and all the previous sites they built. Be aware, they may be working on other projects so you might have to wait.
Since you are not the developer, you can’t fix what goes wrong with the website. That’s what some of these people do, they manage the site. Fix any issues and make changes that you need to the site. These things cost money! And generally, a monthly maintenance fee. That’s not even including the changes you want made. Those will cost extra.
So, in conclusion, it really depends on what your website is going to be on. For WordPress, you want a very customizable site with hundreds of thousands of options. Easy management and relatively inexpensive. If you have a very complex idea that you want for a website, that’s when developers come in. Keep in mind, they are not cheap.
If you would like to talk more about Web Development, reach out to me!
