We just completed a website for Cobb School in Oregon using the WordPress platform and a custom theme. The site is for an elementary school that needed a easy to learn content management system for multiple authors. As a nonprofit, they could not afford a custom content management system.
Designing a basic site using WordPress is fairly straightforward. There are hosting companies, such as A2 Hosting, that offer 1-click WordPress installs. In working with WordPress we found a number of advantages and disadvantages:
Advantages
- For the most part, WordPress is easy to learn and use for folks that do not know coding. The one exception is tables, which do demand a bit of HTML coding knowledge.
- WordPress keeps a revision history of each page which is great for novices and their webmaster alike!
- The image editing options are excellent. Being able to downgrade an image size within the application saves much time.
- Novice editors really liked the “preview before upload” capability.
Disadvantages
- In the theme we used, some aspects of the theme rendered differently in Internet Explorer compared to Firefox and Safari. For example, we could create true orphan pages by selecting a “private” publishing option. Privately-published pages show up on Firefox, but do not on Internet Explorer This was not a shocker and our developer was able to create workarounds in most cases. In our case, we hid orphan pages under a section that’s not frequently visited.
- You can upload images directly from your computer when editing a page, but you have to upload documents such as PDF files directly into the Media Library.
- In the theme we selected, the homepage is considered a theme element and therefore, does not keep a revision history. Also, the homepage does not allow for visual editing. It must be edited in HTML.
- The theme we selected did not have a true “blog posting” section, so we had change a real estate listing section into a blog section.
So lesson learned, choose your theme carefully. We actually purchased a pretty high-quality theme on ThemeForest, but it was still not perfect. Your webmaster or marketing agency may have to tweak the theme for it to meet your requirements. But overall, WordPress is a budget-friendly content management system that’s easy to use.