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Wordpress is my swiss army knife in web design
February 24, 2014

Wordpress is my swiss army knife in web design

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

3.8

Modules Used

  • Various

Overall Satisfaction

WordPress was implemented as a website Content Management System (cms). It was used mostly in the Marketing department, with some implementations considered across the whole organisation. Wordpress provided the organisation with a reliable, flexible and appropriately scalable solution to their web needs for fundraising support sites. It was fast to implement, not cost prohibitive and most importantly easy for end users to use. It is also very flexible which meant that it can evolve with the organisation needs.
  • Wordpress is open source and has a large development community behind it. As a mature system, there are many ways to customise or expand on the system through the use of templates, plugins and development.
  • Wordpress has an easy to use content editor which meets the requirement of providing users with something they can use without needed specialist technical knowledge. Coupled with some customised development it can become a very simple system for people across all levels of an organisation to use.
  • Flexibility is one of the biggest strengths of Wordpress. Through themes, plugins and php based development, it can be purposed to suit almost any use case.
  • Wordpress will struggle to meet needs beyond a certain scale of content purposes. It does not have complex user role management which means it is not suitable for large intranet sites for example. This is not a failing of Wordpress, so much as a desire for it to be more scalable as it is nice to use.
  • One of the flip sides of ultra flexibility and open source is a lack of compliance standards in plugins etc. One must make good decisions about plugins to avoid security issues.
  • Wordpress needs to be updated frequently as do plugins, which means that resource is required to stay on top of the security of the site built with it.
  • Using Wordpress resolved an issue from a previous CMS of proprietary and limited ability to update the site. Non-technical staff were able to maintain their content in Wordpress easily, which saved in vendor costs for content updates.
  • Some observed benefit includes better engagement capabilities through the ability to easily tweak and update marketing content through campaigns.
  • Better ability to monitor, schedule and display content lead to more effective marketing and increased fundraising.
I have used Joomla, proprietary content management systems and non content management system based sites. Wordpress is faster to setup, easier to maintain and easier to customise. Where Joomla is more appropriate for complex user roles, for the same complexity site, Wordpress is much easier to use and maintain. The theme based customisation of Wordpress also means that it can be used behind a number of different sites with different purposes without them all looking similar.
I use Wordpress in my own business as well as in situations for other companies. As a web designer I find it to be my swiss army knife in delivering small to medium websites that look good and are easy to update and maintain. I would highly recommend Wordpress for this purpose, but would advise careful thought about requirements if you need complex user management or large scale in content.
Wordpress is brilliant when used with appropriate scale. It is not a system that will cope with managing a large database of users with many different roles and functions. Wordpress is a brilliant way to rapidly build an easy to maintain site up to a certain size, trying to use Wordpress for a very large website with sophisticated role based access requirements would be difficult. It is not well suited for complex Intranet for example, however can work in conjunction with other systems. In my experience Wordpress is brilliant for delivering smaller websites with no complex role based access requirements.