Is WordPress Really the Right CMS Platform for Your Business Website?

Creating and managing your online business requires you to follow the same basic principals of any business - relying on sound Business Strategies. There are however, a few practices that differ or that just are unique to an online business. Here we share our views and experience with you to help you develop a more effective and profitable online business.

Is WordPress Really the Right CMS Platform for Your Business Website?

13Feb
2013

There is no doubt that WordPress has a strong presence as a Web solution CMS platform and many great looking websites are developed with WordPress for all sorts of businesses. The great attraction for what started out as a blogging solution is that it is free.

But like so many things that are free it does come at a cost when it comes to building robust commercial grade websites in many are also some hidden aspects may not make this a platform your business' website.

Why is the surest so attractive and popular?
It is free to install on your host server
call platform is stable with millions of users worldwide
Templates/themes are readily available that can be set up quite easily
there are a wide range of plug-ins to deliver sort functionality
many developers use this as their core solution platform

The above reasons, WordPress can offer a low price solution to those seeking a new and impressive looking Web presence. Development and implementation overheads are low compared to the other more commercial grade solutions.

The real costs of a WordPress website

As stated, there are costs and many of these are in direct will cost you may not realise until your site has been running for some time.

You will need to purchase a templated theme or have your developer design and build a custom theme to suit your branding and specific needs.Functionality in your site is delivered through plug-ins. These are usually developed by third parties and have little idea about the integrity and upgrade compatibility of these. You also have no control over changes that these third parties may make or indeed failed to make.
WordPress does require technical support. Your WordPress system needs to be regularly updated to cover security issues and feature fixes. Your plug-ins will also need to be upgraded and tested against the currently press release.You need to post your WordPress system on a Web server.
Not all plug-ins necessarily remain compatible with WordPress releases and your website may fail to work unless this is closely matched. Security is a serious concern is WordPress is open source code. The engine is open to code is over the world to review and find holes into which they can play security breaches. This is also the case with some of the plug-ins.
WordPress is merely one part of your total website which most likely includes an online shop, e-mail marketing, a blog, photo galleries, customer relations management system etc... the list goes on. With WordPress these will invariably involves separate databases managed by individual components (plug-ins) from different providers.

So is WordPress really the right solution for your business?

We would suggest that in many cases it is not. For anyone with other than the brochure style website, WordPress can leave you exposed to a wide range of issues that will cost you far more than your original outlay. In managing your website costs is important to understand your TCO (total cost of ownership). A matter often overlooked is the future costs of upgrading site functionality as your business needs change. You want assurance that your website can be readily adapted to your changing business needs and those of your market.

Top left designs made a deliberate decision when it was established not to offer WordPress as a solution platform for the very reasons given above- a lack of commercial grade security, cost of maintenance and support to our clients and managing system compatibility. We don't say there is no place for WordPress - we just don't believe it to be the platform for us to provide the quality of web solutions our clients should have.

Our solutions are built on Adobe Business Catalyst as we found this to be the only non-proprietary Content Management System platform that we could identify offering all the key aspects of running an online business within the one package in a totally secure environment. Clients were not tied to any single web development company’s own CMS platform and had choice of web developer for their solution and support.

If you would like to know more about our web solutions offering a single integrated business great solution then please feel free to contact us.