The CMS I know the best.
WordPress.com is a service that allows you to build a website yourself. They take care of hosting, security, and it’s very DIY. But this post is not about the difference between them, or to convince you which one is better for your situation.
This post is about the WordPress software that anyone can download and install on a web server. WordPress software is what we use to develop a web project, create custom programming for clients, and deliver a website from tip to tail that a client can make changes to.
The Gemini Creative website you're using now is built without a CMS. It's not WordPress. There’s no login, no plugins, and no content editor. A website like this can't be handed over to a client. How would they edit their content, create new pages, or add photos and videos? They need a CMS to do those things. A CMS like WordPress uses a database to display content on a website. The website admin makes changes to text, adds a photo, aligns it to the left or right, and clicks "Update". Those changes are saved to their database. The web page asks the database for the content and violà! - it appears on the screen.
Our clients need a CMS to edit their website's content. We choose WordPress because it’s the one we know the best. I started working with it 16 years ago when Chris Coyier and Jeff Star published their book Digging Into WordPress (2009). “425 pages of practical WordPress wisdom in full-color printed format.” Indeed it was. It was even spiral-bound so you could lay it flat while coding. Thanks, guys! That book was a critical tool in forming my career path.
Versatility
If there has been a time when I told a client that “we can’t do that with WordPress” it is likely because I didn’t know that we could. The WordPress plugin Advanced Custom Fields allows me to create a custom backend for the client to easily edit the crazy things happening on the frontend. A well-coded WordPress website can have relationships between pages. We can ask the database to create menus. Custom post types and custom content makes some very cool stuff.
For example:
Our client, Ward’s Nursery in Great Barrington, MA, is a wealth of garden knowledge. Everyone in town knows, when they have a question about plants, to ask someone at Ward’s. They are constantly answering questions over the phone, email, and in-person, every day. We wondered, could we leverage their website to provide answer to the most-asked questions? Could their website become an information resource for their customers to peruse? Since WordPress is already driven by a database and that database is searchable, why not feed it questions and answers for customers to search, read, and learn?!
We created a "custom post type" in WordPress and called it "FAQs". Ward’s staff can create a new FAQ by entering the question as the post title and answer the question in the content editor. The website visitor can now see a grid of questions and answers. We called it Ask the Experts. Customers can click to read the answer and see a few more FAQs related to the one they're reading. The search bar looks for the term in the question or the answer. Ward’s staff can create new FAQs at any time and the database will grow for years to come.
Safety & Security
WordPress websites get hacked every day. It's is a popular platform and any exploit is quickly known across the internet. Hackers use software to make a list of sites that are eligable for their attack, then get to work, installing just a bit of code on thousands of sites. Two reasons a WordPress site is easy to hack are:
- WordPress core or its plugins are not up to date
- Weak account passwords
The developers at WordPress are constantly evolving their software and at no cost to the people who use it. Security updates to WordPress are provided often, making it more secure than it was yesterday. Plugin authors have taken this work further by developing new ways to make websites difficult to attack. It is the website admin that is responsible for keeping their WordPress website up to date and out of easy reach for bad actors. A well-maintained WordPress site is not on the hacker’s list of easy prey.
