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For small companies it is simple enough these days to have someone install WordPress, buy a theme that looks pretty good for $18 USD and you're good to go. It

by junto 11y ago

For small companies it is simple enough these days to have someone install WordPress, buy a theme that looks pretty good for $18 USD and you're good to go. It might be a buggy insecure platform, but for non-tech savvy users it's brilliant. It doesn't make financial sense anymore to develop custom themes and designs from scratch. Large corps with their own branding is a different kettle of fish, but have fun trying to get on their preferred supplier list when you are a four person design agency. Developing a one off, responsive, standards compliant website, that lookd good too, is expensive and clients don't want to pay for it.

busterarm 11y ago
Mid-sized companies too. We have a large content team and use WordPress across our company (several dozen websites) because it gets the job done for that content team. Our sites are ultimately just landing pages for ads and feed into our sales team as leads. With our small 3-4 person devteam, we make our own themes and build into our WordPress sites all of the features that you'd want to host a site that's just content and a pipeline into our CRM (lots of handrolled plugins, custom functionality). We use modern ops practices (shoutouts to Pantheon for being a forward-looking PHP host) and write great code on a platform that's honestly not used to it. Some of the most interesting work that I've ever done. As our team grows and our tools get more robust, we may explore using Wordpress to generate static pages for better performance. We also use other tools (Laravel, Rails, Node) when it makes sense to. Seriously though with good ops practices and developers who aren't lazy running the show, Wordpress can be a fantastic platform. This is absolutely some of the most interesting work that I've ever done. WordPress runs 1/4 of the internet and not because 1/4 of the internet is cheap (though WordPress and PHP in general have fit that niche for a long time) - it's because training content authors to use custom/other tools costs money.
toxican 11y ago
I work in a small city in Maryland, so I'm not very concerned or familiar with the going ons in major cities. But for us at least, we've seen that when the companies go for the $18 WP theme, they usually come to us when they hit a point where they can't figure out how to expand the site and have us either step in or start over. Same with all of those shitty "build your own site" services. People will inevitably get frustrated with the limitations and want more, and that's when we step in. But then again, we don't have any shortage of people who want a fully custom/responsive website built from the ground up. And there's also a real sense of community here where a lot of small business owners would rather pay a local company to do it than pay out the ass for someone in DC/Baltimore to do it or deal with a faceless online service like Squarspace.

by junto 11y ago

busterarm 11y ago

Mid-sized companies too. We have a large content team and use WordPress across our company (several dozen websites) because it gets the job done for that content team. Our sites are ultimately just landing pages for ads and feed into our sales team as leads. With our small 3-4 person devteam, we make our own themes and build into our WordPress sites all of the features that you'd want to host a site that's just content and a pipeline into our CRM (lots of handrolled plugins, custom functionality). We use modern ops practices (shoutouts to Pantheon for being a forward-looking PHP host) and write great code on a platform that's honestly not used to it. Some of the most interesting work that I've ever done. As our team grows and our tools get more robust, we may explore using Wordpress to generate static pages for better performance. We also use other tools (Laravel, Rails, Node) when it makes sense to. Seriously though with good ops practices and developers who aren't lazy running the show, Wordpress can be a fantastic platform. This is absolutely some of the most interesting work that I've ever done. WordPress runs 1/4 of the internet and not because 1/4 of the internet is cheap (though WordPress and PHP in general have fit that niche for a long time) - it's because training content authors to use custom/other tools costs money.

toxican 11y ago

I work in a small city in Maryland, so I'm not very concerned or familiar with the going ons in major cities. But for us at least, we've seen that when the companies go for the $18 WP theme, they usually come to us when they hit a point where they can't figure out how to expand the site and have us either step in or start over. Same with all of those shitty "build your own site" services. People will inevitably get frustrated with the limitations and want more, and that's when we step in. But then again, we don't have any shortage of people who want a fully custom/responsive website built from the ground up. And there's also a real sense of community here where a lot of small business owners would rather pay a local company to do it than pay out the ass for someone in DC/Baltimore to do it or deal with a faceless online service like Squarspace.