Overall Satisfaction with WordPress
Wordpress is our primary platform for our online courses (including hundreds of videos, community interactions between teachers and students, a paid membership system, and more), our main site (consisting of blog, live event scheduling, and more), our shop (selling a sizable selection of physical goods), and a handful of other offerings.
- Versatility - If you're comfortable learning some computer code, the sky is essentially the limit on what you can do with Wordpress via the thousands of available plugins.
- Reliability - Wordpress has proven to be more stable and reliable than other services we've used.
- Huge community for support - because of its renown and popularity, the Wordpress community is huge, and you can consequently find ideas and support among peers very easily.
- User-friendliness - As is usually the case, there is an inverse relationship between a software's power/robustness, and its ease of use. Making a functioning site beyond a basic template will require a learning curve, especially as more plugins are introduced to the process.
- It's easy to make things ugly - Because Wordpress offers so much freedom of design and function, you have all the power in your hands to make an ugly, dysfunctional site--other services we use have a paradigm against this, and restrict design freedom to prevent you from making something "ugly."
- Back-end interface feels dated and cluttered - The back end of Wordpress could use a little streamlining and updating. Controls and menus feel like they haven't had a face lift in a few years.
- Online courses - Our online course site made a gigantic leap in quality when we moved from our previous platform to Wordpress. This has resulted in hundreds more membership subscriptions.
- Shop - Wordpress has served us well for our physical goods shop too, and has been consistently reliable at completing a customer's online ordering process.
WordPress and ONTRAPORT do each have their own strengths and weaknesses--what ONTRAPORT lacks in versatility, it makes up for with user-friendliness. Really the use of either comes down to your specific needs. ONTRAPORT isn't currently equipped to build a fully-functioning website structure; it's better used for making discrete sales pages and forms (which it does at least as well or better than Wordpress, certainly more easily).