A no-nonsense, honest, female review from someone who chose to work with WordPress everyday!
February 28, 2014

A no-nonsense, honest, female review from someone who chose to work with WordPress everyday!

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

Software Version

3.8.1

Modules Used

  • last 4 years previous versions from 2014 back

Overall Satisfaction

We use WordPress to build websites for our Customers, we also use it for our own website. WordPress provides a flexible and scalable website solution, that is easy to use and build upon. With it's many plugins a WordPress site can take on many functions and fulfil many categories of website. The versatility of WordPress means it can be a long term website solution, that the customer can manage themselves and develop as their business does. A WordPress site owner may not need to pay for hired help with developing the website, WordPress has a great support community and as it's open source, is free to use by anyone.
  • WordPress is very user-friendly. Few steps are needed to edit and add content and with 100's of online free tutorials, videos, manuals and support you can easily teach yourself how to use it.
  • WordPress is versatile. It can grow from a blog to website, to an e-commerce site with a forum and much more, you can stick with 1 site and just keep on growing and evolving it!
  • WordPress uses themes to give your site it's look and feel. There are 1000's of free and paid for themes available. A WordPress site can have a theme changed as often as you like, so your WordPress site can constantly update it's look without having to be totally rebuilt each time.
  • With the 1000's of free and paid for plugins available for WordPress, you can have nearly any function you can think of added in!
  • Like all software, WordPress get's updated. It's a good idea to try and update your WordPress core version every time but sometimes updates don't go all that smoothly and you can run into trouble with it. It would be nice to have a stress free update solution! I backup before every core update to cover myself.
  • It would be nice to see an image overlay/pop out included in the next version of WordPress, this should be standard.
  • It would be nice to see child pages automatically added to the menus. At present parent items are automatically added to menus, but child pages aren't and you have to go into the Menus options to add them. Not a bad thing really, but my clients tend to forget this extra step.
  • Positive: WordPress is can be set up vey quickly, you can have a site go live as fast as you can input the content, once it's been set up with the right functions and theme.
  • Positive: People want their HTML sites moved over to WordPress because of it's versatility and ease of updating.
  • Positive: Even though I may be missing out on profit when my Customers don't need to come back to me for changes to their site, what I do get is great Customer feedback about how I have solved their website issues and how much they love their WordPress site - for that I get recommend to others.
I have evaluated various CMS that you can add on to HTML sites and I also spent some time working with Joomla.

With the CMS add ons for HTML, they are fine if you just want to update the text exactly where it sits on the page. At the time I evaluated them, they didn't allow for much expansion to a page or the site.

With Joomla, I found that there were so many steps involved in editing or adding content and pages, that it was far too much to expect my customers to learn to be able to update their site themselves. Which in my opinion, which totally misses the point of a CMS.

I have tried a couple of others but none of them seem as intuitive or easy to use as WordPress.
Every time! It's so easy to use and with more and more plugins and themes that get developed and become available everyday, I get excited to see what's new for WordPress. I love looking through all the new themes and when I get asked can you add "x" to a site, I am very confident I will find a plugin that can do the job. WordPress and it's contributors don't let me down. I am very passionate about the WordPress and am not really interested in looking for a substitute for it.
Personally, I think WordPress is perfect for small businesses and start up businesses. It's also the next best website step to take after you've got fed up with your DIY/Free website. If you're someone who is not sure about how many pages your site will need to begin with, or maybe you think you might want to use the site to sell online later, WordPress is perfect, as you can start it off small, 1 page even, and then add on those other functions and pages as you need it.

However, there is a point when I say, WordPress is not the solution for your site. For me that point is if a customer wants a site to sell more than 100 products or if they need a site with a requires bespoke functionality. If you are going to spend over a certain amount of money on a site, then it may be better to get one made bespoke.

Usability

WordPress is very easy. If your quick at picking things up, just having a look round the WordPress dashboard and going through the menu options will teach you allot. If you need a bit more help, then there are many free tutorials, videos and support forums out there to get you started.
ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Familiar
None
  • Adding and editing page content - if you can use MS Word, you can add and edit your content in WordPress. Both editing pages and blog posts have the same editing screens.
  • Adding a blog. If a WordPress site hasn't got a blog page, it's easy to implement, in just a few clicks.
  • Adding images to the pages and posts, it's just like inserting an image into an email or MS Word comment.
  • Plugins for additional functionality. As long as you read the reviews and make sure you're getting a good one, they are dead easy to implement. You may need the instructions for setting up some and others are obvious.
  • WordPress Core Updates sometimes there really straight forward, other times silly things go wrong. Always back up your site and deactivate your plugins before starting a WordPress core install.
Yes - You get a different experience depending on tablet or phone. They are both cut down versions of the backend and take a little getting used to, as does everything, but it has everything you need to blog or add pages on the go. Considering some of us feel allot more inspired while out and about it's a great way of updating your blog. You can also add images and review comments.