Custom Wordpress Design

Why WordPress?
Wordpress is a platform that almost everyone has heard about. Many of us use it for our blogs and personal portfolio websites.

But WordPress today is no longer just a blogging platform. Its a full featured Content Management System (CMS) that competes with the best Content Management Systems.

Big Apple Design Group recommends WordPress today by default as a CMS to all of our customers.

This is due to a few facts that we know from first-hand experience. Below is a discussion on a few of these facts.

1. WordPress is fast and runs superbly on low cost web hosting providers
This is absolutely true. You can have a zippy WordPress installation running on a $10-$20 per month hosting service.

Not only is the front-end of the website fast, so is the admin section. This is due to a very lean programming architecture incorporated into WordPress.

2. WordPress builds incrementally with every new version
This is good news for WordPress developers. What you learned using Version 2.x does not necessarily all go out of the window with version 3.x.

WordPress tends to add new features and functions like “taxonomy” which was a Drupal specific function that builds on existing capabilities of WordPress. And WordPress add features at a rate that has proven to be far faster than its competitors.

So you always have more and more methods of achieving the same goal or different goals.

3. WordPress has a huge base of users and plugins
A huge base of users and a huge base of plugins are both required for an effective community. Having a large user-base allows all plugins to be tested extensively and also creates a market for developers to build new plugins for fame and fortune.

4. WordPress is very well documented and great for time sensitive projects
At a project that we bid on a bit more than a year ago, we lost out on a largish project because we recommended using WordPress instead of Drupal. The reason we recommended WordPress was that the project was time sensitive and had to be completed in time for the year’s sales season.

The person in-charge of making the buy decision at the company issuing the RFP, had apparently read a few blogs comparing WordPress and Drupal and felt that Drupal was feature richer and could do more.

About a year or so down the road, the project still was not live.

We got a similar site about 2 months after we lost this bid. The site was of a similar complexity and the client was open to WordPress.

We had the site running beautifully on a Virtual Private Server. Traffic on the site is about 100,000 uniques per day and the site is very video and photo intensive.

For time sensitive projects, we often refuse to do projects in Drupal for practical reasons.

The analogy I like to give people is:

You go to McDonalds and get a burger. You pretty much are guaranteed satisfaction (provided you are into that sort of food). This is WordPress. Its fast to build sites on and will do just about anything you want in a reliable fashion. It has plugins for just about anything you can think of.

You go to a fancy restaurant in Manhattan. You’re guaranteed a big bill. But satisfaction is another thing. This is Drupal. Drupal can be a great solution for specific types of websites but overall WordPress will get the job done much faster 19 out of 20 times. Drupal is a fanstastic platform in its own right. But for the majority of customers, WordPress is always a better solution.

5. Theme Providers
Lastly, if you are open to a template based (non-custom) design, you can find thousands of WordPress themes that are of a high quality. And these themes range from free to perhaps a hundred dollars.

The average customer can find a suitable theme, add a logo and with half a day of tweaks, have a wonderful website platform that will provide many years of service.

See some of our custom WordPress theme samples here.