Advantages to WordPress

I am a pretty big fan of My partners and I have been learning the advantages of adopting frameworks for our clients projects because of the benefits they can bring to the table.

As of late we have been using Pleth Networks, LLC, is planning on adding WordPress Framework sites to our list of service offerings in hopes of capturing this market segment, this blog entry relates to the advantages of using WordPress from a developers perspective.

Stay tuned to the Pleth Networks Corporate Blog for announcements regarding our WordPress Offerings.

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If you follow the web very closely at all you probably already know what WordPress is. It’s an open-source web application that was originally intended as a blogging platform but has evolved into much, much, more than that. Today WordPress can be found in use on the backend of today’s top news and entertainment portals such as CNN, Yahoo, People, and the New York Times just to name a few, as well as on personal, non-profit, and church websites.

WordPress‘s rise in popularity comes from the many advantages it brings to the table from a management and development perspective. For the sake of this post I am going to cover the developmental advantages to using WordPress.

Back in the day, developers like myself would often times shy away from smaller non-profit websites simply because the client didn’t have the budget to afford the amount of time we would have to spend hand coding their website to make it do exactly what they wanted it to do. This is no longer the case with the option of WordPress.

Installing the WordPress Framework

Since WordPress is more or less a framework of base source code written in PHP that connects to MySQL it can be installed and up and running in minutes in it’s very basic form. By basic form, I mean that it’s sporting a very basic look and feel. WordPress is installed with a default template that’s very generic and doesn’t have any Plugins installed on the front end that offer any real functionality.

Real Basic Framework to start with…

This is not a bad thing though, as a developer I prefer the framework of a web project to be minimal on the front end, this allows me to add only the Plugins that the client or end user is looking for. There are a wealth of Plugins already listed on WordPress‘s website: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/, and there are always new ones added to their directory on a daily basis.

Working with WordPress Plugins

Just like the WordPress Installation installing a WordPress Plugin is a pretty fast process and doesn’t involve a whole lot of development time as opposed to manually adding JavaScript like we used to have to do on hand-coded projects. The Plugin Directory allows you to search through the many Plugins that other developers have already written and contributed as open source. The Plugins are also categorized by tags as well such as Post, Widget, Admin, Comments, Sidebar, etc. to help you easily locate exactly what you are looking for.

One thing that I am sure developers run into is that while looking for Plugins to add is that there might be several Plugins listed that do pretty much the same thing, I have ran into this myself from time to time. For this reason I have tagged in my delicious account the Plugins that I like the best and just refer back to those each time so it makes it easy to manage multiple installations across the board in the event an update is available for a particular Plugin. (oh, and inside the wordpress admin area it alerts you when there is an update to your installed Plugins).

Managing the Presentation

Since WordPress is comprised of PHP source code that is styled by CSS all of your wordpress installations are standards compliant right out of the box. This is an important consideration these days for many developers. Again, back in the day we used to code websites with a lot of table based layouts that were spliced from Photoshop or Paintshop generated graphics, these were a far cry from the standards compliant CSS / XHTML driven websites you see online today. In order to bring some of these older websites up to standards compliance it can literally take hours of coding time (especially an old schooler like me) to recode a site and bring it into compliance. Many times the client doesn’t even concern themselves with compliance to start with, or even appreciate it, much less pay you to do. Starting out with WordPress, or migrating an existing site into WordPress is a great idea that also get’s you into compliance..

There are also a wide variety of WordPress Themes available online: http://themes.wordpress.net/, these themes are available as “starters” for wordpress projects and are all usually pretty inline with standards compliance and optimum usability. These “starter” themes can be a great place to start designing your clients vision online, also, if you are interested there is a lot of documentation online for those interested in crafting their own themes: http://themes.wordpress.net/faq/

Incorporating WordPress into legacy Site Revisions

As I mentioned earlier, a good way to bring an out of compliance website into compliance is to migrate it into wordpress. This is something that I am going to try to make a conscious effort to do with older client web projects that have been online for years and are out of standards compliance is to bring them into the wordpress framework in a phased manner. I plan on doing this when the client contacts us for a major site revision. I have already handled a few of our older client projects like this and these clients have really appreciated the flexibility that the WordPress CMS brings to the table. Not to mention the Windows Live Writer Desktop Application that can be used to manage WordPress Blogs, it’s a super nice blog editor that Microsoft released for free a while back. It’s much like using Microsoft Word and a lot of clients already understand the concepts of Microsoft Word.

Cost Effective Solution for Small Businesses, Non-Profits, and Personal Websites

Since managed monthly hosting rate in the ballpark of $50 or so, this also is enticing to those who might not have a large budget allocated for hosting. With a lot of companies out there, like my company Pleth Networks, LLC, this “managed hosting rate” basically means that the client doesn’t have to know anything about web hosting, they don’t have to enter their control panel at all, we handle the installation and configuration of their site, database, graphics, and ftp all of their installation files in place for them, they simply just have to manage their website which from what we have found, is why they chose a company like us (Pleth) in the first place.

A New Portable Frontier for Smaller Projects

With companies like my own, Pleth Networks, now offering full service WordPress Framework websites I can see the landscape of the web changing quite a bit over time. In the past each and every web firm out there had their own methodology for developing client websites and content management solutions, often times this methodology was proprietary and not very portable from host to host, especially on the content management side of things. If a lot of other companies out there shift their focus toward offering WordPress based websites for smaller accounts I think that we will find client websites to be a lot more portable in the future.

For example, we (Pleth Networks) used to get a lot of phone calls from prospective clients who were tired of their current providers or worst case scenario their providers were going out of business. Whether their provider was a development firm or a hosting firm they basically had the client in a bad situation. The client would want to switch to Pleth as soon as possible in order to avoid downtime but due to proprietary coding this often times that hasn’t been a reality. We (Pleth Networks) have always welcomed the idea of bringing clients into our client base but on occasion we have had to hesitate and even turn down accounts for this very reason. This more or less blocked the client from making a cost-effective migration to another service provider like Pleth. With WordPress, migrations can be pretty fast and even transparent to the end user. No one wants to keep an unhappy customer (at least development firms with good ethics) so developing projects in WordPress takes on an even more favorability in terms of giving the client their money’s worth.