Traditional or Wordpress

Few customers know about the technology which is used to make a website and few will care how you made it. But some customers want a blog to be incorporated with their sites. Now to make one what Wordpress(WP) provides out of the box will take you time to build.

As a developer, I started with traditional HTML(plain HTML in an editor, no dreamweaver or fireworks). I hated frameworks as I thought they are more pain than gain. Then I slowly started learning and I embraced WP and some other frameworks like the best thing that happened to me. Not only they save you time developing but also to achieve more in shorter time and they are as flexible as traditional way if you know the way out. If you are going into web development, I would suggest you look into WP to speed up the development in least time.

P.S. You need to have good knowledge about PHP and MySQL if you want maximum customisation power. But for not so complex websites, wordpress admin dashboard and some basic knowledge are enough to do most stuffs.

Thanks fourth-monkey

At least I know that making traditional sites isn't old-school and outdated. I was starting to this that all sites should now be on a CMS and that customers would get annoyed that I've used an out of date method.

I'm going to look into wordpress. I just need my hosting reverting back to Linux from MS. I got it converted to MS a few years ago because we had a site that had a site that used some .NET but we don't have it anymore.

There is nothing wrong or out of date with having an html site and no CMS, it's just that nowadays, most people want to be able to edit their own content, add mods and plugins that improve their website in different ways, add more content themselves, and so on. Without a CMS you are stuck with either a website cast in stone or paying the website designer/developer for continually updating it, and you are missing out on the mods and plugins available. It's more of a no-brainer than anything, to have one.

Thanks for your input. We're on MS hosting as we did a few ASP things a while back but we don't need it anymore. We're converting back to linux hosting and I'll get my head around the wordpress stuff. From your responses it looks worthwhile to look into just for the speed of being able to knock a site together.

Thanks again.

I have been looking into CMS's for another organisation. And I guess they have their benefits in that anyone with permissions can make changes, but that is at the same time dangerous.

From what I have seen so far, WP sites show made by WP at the bottom of the page, with a link out. I'm no graphics design master, building design is my thing, but what I use is a Mac only application, Freeway from Softpress.

Its really easy to learn and intuitive, you have total control over the content and any links. It's easier than Dreamweaver, and cheaper, but no good if you're planning to develop the site on Windows.

I don't have a lot of experience with WordPress, but have been using Drupal.

It is extremely flexible, and if you so desire, you can remove any obvious connections with the original system - such as "powered by Drupal".

there are also numerous reasons for using a CMS like WordPress or Drupal, especially when making websites for customers.

Security shouldn't be too much of an issue provided you have sufficiently complicated passwords set up, and have the file structure set up correctly.
Also, i don't know if WordPress has a similar thing, but Drupal has a module that can check your website's security before you make it live.

In the end though, if you can get what you want out of a basic HTML site, it should be faster and more reliable. The downside is less features.

I am a complete novice with websites, but after about two months of practice can now pretty much do most things on my wordpress and woocommerce site (not allowed to mention it yet).

When i say most things, i mean blogs, new articles, pages, products and general updates of prices and stock etc.

what i cannot do is the back end complex design parts, and i have been told not to attempt plugin updates alone, as these can crash the system!

What you're doing here is merely using the content management system to edit your page content. The OP is talking about using Wordpress software as part of designing websites. I should add, there is more than Wordpress as a CMS and better ecommerce software than such as woocommerce.

If you want to design sites in Wordpress, check out Artisteer. It's a software program to design Wordpress themes (templates). Netbeans is another open-source Wordpress design tool. I've heard good things about it, and have downloaded the software but haven't tried it yet.