I’ve been developing and customising Wordrpress for a long time. It’s the go-to for smaller projects due to it’s zero cost, thousands of (mostly free) plugins and flexible themes.
It’s either the client-requested CMS, or the best fit for the budget.
Wordpress a great way of pulling something together - you know it’s flexible, it’s almost guaranteed that a plugin or solution exists for every client request. It Can Be Done.
My go-to Wordpress Plugins:
Those are the no-brainers that I will install for just about every Wordpress development project. They allow for a better admin experience, and a safer and faster site.
Over the years I have been asked to use (and edit) existing Wordpress themes. They can be a great way of getting something ‘acceptable’ quickly and cheaply, but I do prefer to create my own. Regardless if it’s a bought theme or bespoke, time is required to make the content and layout work. To make it look professional, coherent and credible.
While I enjoy getting my hands dirty with any Wordpress project, it’s not my favourite content management system. It can feel messier, more chaotic in the code wrangling. And the admin experience is not great - it feels like I’m always fighting against the ‘this creates a blog’ paradigm.
If I get to choose the CMS, I recommend ExpressionEngine or more-likely CraftCMS. They offer a cleaner slate and were created to be ‘anything you want’ content management systems. The admin experience is much cleaner and customisable. I feel like I’m building up to the end goal with these two, as opposed to Wordpress where I’m removing things, hiding bits and wrangling others.
All that said - it’s a great tool - there’s a reason it’s used so widely! If you need someone to create something from scratch or tweak an existing Wordpress project, let me know.
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I've been a freelance interface designer, UX / UI guy and front-end developer for over 22 years, and a full-time freelancer since 2006. Contact me if you're looking for a help with your project, or your freelance setup.