Is WordPress Right For Your Brand?
Personally, I am a big fan of WordPress. The CSS/ PHP/ HTML combination allows for flexibility in design and responsiveness, while the user-friendly back-end of WordPress makes it easy to edit content. However, despite its easy-use from a business owner perspective, it is not always the best content management system or CMS for a website.
There are two major instances where I would explicitly NOT recommend WordPress for your brand:
1. Is your site E-Commerce?
In the case of an E-Commerce site, WordPress would not be your best choice. There are WordPress themes and plugins to drive E-Commerce capability, but if the major function of your site is E-Commerce and your sales, WordPress would not be my first choice. Joomla and especially, Magento, are much better platforms in this case. Magento (formerly OSCommerce) is designed specifically for E-Commerce and the major admin panel functionalities are controlling your sales, inventory, and promotions. You can even manage your customer base from this portal.
2. Is your site more of a web application than a website?
Dynamic, user interactive sites are the new trend. There is a certain element of this that can be covered in WordPress, again through plugins, but this interactivity and networking capability is better handled through more development intense platforms such as Joomla, Drupal, and Ruby on Rails.
A web application would be more suited to the youngest of the three, Ruby, or Drupal. These two are the most dynamic and developer based. Ruby has a very friendly coding language that can be picked up fairly easily. Drupal is the elder and deeply-rooted CMS, sworn by for many old-school developers.
Something like an intranet of a site based in networking would often be more suited to Joomla. It is very flexible and easy to use. It serves mainly as a middle ground between the ease-of-use found in WordPress and the development-intensive flexibility of Drupal.
Aside from these two cases, the second of which could be quite broad, I would point you towards WordPress as the way to go. From the increasingly important Search Engine Optimization perspective, it simply cannot be beat. As content becomes increasingly important to search engines, a system originally built for easily managing the content of a blog can’t be beat.
Particularly for small and medium sized businesses looking to gain traction in the ultra-competitive internet marketplace, the ability to quickly add and edit content that WordPress provides is invaluable. Once a site has been built, it is easy to give the business owner, however inexperienced, the reigns to the site without too much worry of catastrophe.
As a web developer, I find what is considered to be the least development-friendly CMS to be perfectly flexible. Functionality is easily added and controlled through plugins, custom or sourced. Design is very subjective, and with the wealth of themes available on sites like ThemeForest, you are sure to find one you like.
In summary, with the increasing importance of web presence, regardless of the business, an affordable, modern, good-looking, and flexible website is of necessity. WordPress meets, and exceeds all of these requirements, producing a site that you can easily manage and in turn leverage to enhance your business.
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