Non-programmer series – Wordpress

The series is based on websites or content management systems (CMS) I have used myself. In the videos, you can watch what I managed to create between 30 min to 60 min on each platform. I also show some of the futures while doing so. The goal of this series was to see how fast I could make a website look decent with no coding, and how “easy” it was. The things I will write about are the standards of each site and what is included and pitfalls by using these.

VideoThis video is from 2017 and has not been updated, but the review will be from 2019 WordPress.

Conclusion:

Wordpress might be the hardest CMS to beat from a non-programmer perspective. It is easy to learn, easy to use, and with some additional time, it looks like a professional website. WordPress is the best site if you want a site up and running fast, preferably a blog or a news site. Wordpress can function as a static site as well without a problem but isn’t what it was made for.

The review

Wordpress is one of the most popular CMS and no other are even close to having as many users on the platform. Wordpress is built on PHP, but it’s nothing you need to know to alter it. Wordpress has a ton of prebuilt themes, and plugins, in such way it works as a website builder, but with more freedom, for the user to customise the site after their liking.

Why should you use Wordpress?

PLUGINS – to be honest, the only reason to use Wordpress is the plugins. It makes your life so much easier. Even though some will argue the website gets bloated and slow, this is the best thing which happened to someone who doesn’t know a single code. Need functional SEO? Plugin. Need google analytics? Plugin. Need a contact form? – plugin. Membership service? Plugin. Custom login page? Plugin. Security? Plugin. You get where I’m going with this.

Other than that WordPress is easy to use and easy to get up and running. For those who are picking a CMS to learn CSS or even PHP, this is a great place to start. Many themes allow the user to alter the page with CSS snippets and PHP codes to customise Wordpress are on WordPress documentation. Another thing with WordPress is the opportunity to buy professional packages which then function as a drag and drop, to get a fully professional look right out of the box.

Wordpress can be installed locally through a server as I did with Bitnami. When it’s installed locally WordPress can be used to create multisite which has a steeper learning curve. It can be online through Wordpress.com (this future consists of payment options like WIX).

What is in WordPress?

WordPress a huge open-source platform, the developers have made a ton of plugins (or add-ons) and themes both free and paid version. The user can create everything from a blog (which was the original purpose of Wordpress), news site, social media, forums, e-commerce and more.

Wordpress.com version where there are payment options comes with more futures such as backup and security done by someone for you.

Downsides to WordPress

On most of the CMS, the main reasons to use them are also their pitfalls. Wordpress is no exception to that. WordPress is the most famous CMS and for that reason also the most hacked CMS. The WordPress sites keep getting hacked, and if there are none to few measures to cover for it, the page will at a point, not function. The other part which is fantastic about Wordpress is the themes and plugins, however, it constantly needs to be updated or else they will be a security vulnerability. Depending on how many plugins you are using this can be everything from once every two weeks to twice a week.

Another thing with the plugins is that not all developers are creating them to be compatible with all the other plugins. Which means that downloading one plugin may crash your site because it wasn’t compatible with the theme or a plugin you already installed.