WordPress should never be underestimated.
Although nearly of a quarter of the web runs on WordPress—including some huge important sites—the reputation of WordPress is unfairly depressed. (Some major websites in WordPress: The New Yorker, BBC America, Sony Music, and the New York Times.) There is a notion that it’s not powerful, or that it’s a tool for amateurs, not real programmers.
It’s kind of true, but not completely. Amateurs CAN and DO make great use of WordPress. And you don’t need to be a programmer to do great things with WordPress. But if you REALLY know what you are doing and use WordPress skillfully in conjunction with top-notch plugins and other tools, WordPress can’t be beat.
Here’s the thing: we don’t really need programmers all the time anymore. That what all these tools are about. Plugins are written by programmers to add functionality not native to WordPress. A developer needs to know how to select a good plugin and how to use it. The developer doesn’t need to know much about programming. Standardizing on WordPress is a winning strategy.
I started building websites decades ago by hand. I used HTML and a smattering of programming, mostly Javascript. I supplemented this work by investigating and using whatever good tools were available. There wasn’t much back then.
Here’s the thing: we don’t really need programmers all the time anymore.
Today, you can develop and concentrated on design, marketing, content and process. I usually use only my tools and a bit of CSS in development. But the tools are now magnificent!
Still, why WordPress? Why not Drupal? Or Joomla? Or something else? WordPress is my choice because it’s so widely used and can be used by people of different skill levels. I think that a company that has or manages multiple websites should, if possible, convert all of them to WordPress. This makes updating and maintenance much simpler than working with multiple systems.
With the tools I use, I can develop excellent websites with amazing speed—and add tools to help less skillful people update them without destroying my work.
What a developer DOES need (if not programming), is an understanding of all the key issues related to websites and the tools to deal with them: SEO, server maintenance, plugin maintenance, speed and caching, etc. While any one of these issues can become overwhelming, a single individual can deal with all of them competently with good tools.
Okay. That’s all I wanted to say: Standardize on WordPress. Identify and use good tools. Understand the issues.
There are many good tools. Some that I currently favor are: Divi theme, GT Metrix, Google Analytics, Yoast SEO, W3 Total Cache, All-In-One Migration. Thanks for reading.