wordpress and agencies

[petemurphy]

agencies / web design people that sell wordpress sites - do they use frameworks, pre built themes / build their own?

always wondered as is there any need to code for most sme sites these days?

do they use frameworks like genesis or build from scratch. do they just buy a theme that matches the clients requirements and change them or build from scratch? do they use themes like generatepress or things like elementor?

why would you code from scratch these days? whats the done thing?

pls discuss

[akirk]

petemurphy said:

agencies / web design people that sell wordpress sites - do they use frameworks, pre built themes / build their own?

always wondered as is there any need to code for most sme sites these days?

do they use frameworks like genesis or build from scratch. do they just buy a theme that matches the clients requirements and change them or build from scratch? do they use themes like generatepress or things like elementor?

why would you code from scratch these days? whats the done thing?

pls discuss

Do you have a reason for asking?

I suspect that there are a number of truths out there and therefore a number of practices...

- There are a lot of companies who are not coders - they may dominantly use Wordpress and themes they download / buy (or Wix / Squarespace / etc.). The advantage of Wordpress is that it presents as a system which needs no technical skills - therefore it is ideally suited to these companies, they can present something to their clients which looks great and meets all visual expectations... however, once an issue is found, they perhaps don't always have the skill to sort it out - we pick up quite a few customers in that situation where their previous 'coding' company didn't know how to code - almost 100% of these sites are Wordpress based.

- there are also companies who do code, where Wordpress is a convenient very cheap shortcut to a solution they can sell to their clients - there are many SMEs who don't see the value in investing in their website, so cost becomes a big issue and Wordpress is often an appropriate answer. Again, as cost is a key component, they are likely to use a free or cheap commercial template.

It is worth noting that even outside Wordpress solutions templates have a strong role to play. We can buy in a commercial template (c. $75) and convert it to use for the client (colours / brand / images / content / structure) cheaper than we can produce a template from scratch. So many of our websites will start life as a template - we have clients who have spent over £250k on website development, and the genesis of the website was in a commercial $50 template.

However, they do not stay as generic templates - the template is simply a short-cut and money-saving exercise.

Is there a need to code for SMEs today - good question, and the answer lies not in need, but in how the company sees the value of the website. For those who simply want a 'smart' website in their colours and with their logo - then probably the answer is no. However, for companies looking to use the web / digital to build their business, then the answer is almost always yes - there are small to large opportunities for most companies where bespoke code can transform how they can use the web. I would reckon that 90%+ of our work involves bespoke code...

[Sebastian Tombs]

petemurphy said:

agencies / web design people that sell wordpress sites - do they use frameworks, pre built themes / build their own?

always wondered as is there any need to code for most sme sites these days?

do they use frameworks like genesis or build from scratch. do they just buy a theme that matches the clients requirements and change them or build from scratch? do they use themes like generatepress or things like elementor?

why would you code from scratch these days? whats the done thing?

pls discuss

In my agency we would always produce completely bespoke designs and code, and then fight with wordpress to implement them and work round its limitations. However, it's important to understand why we do this, because we're solving a particular set of problems that businesses might have.

The research, UX and design aspects are a core part of our offering, and it's usually all connected with building, extending or strengthening a brand, and it's usually for a large established company who have already got their own online presence and established look and feel. Clients would come to us with a specific need, perhaps to understand the behaviour of visitors to their site, analyse the data and discover how this might feed into a new campaign, product launch, or whatever. For these types of project an off-the-shelf design or template wouldn't cut the mustard. Firstly there is no differentiation, and secondly it's likely that the template would both solve problems that the client doesn't have, or fail to solve problems it does, which means you would need to spend development time on it anyway. Finally, if the research steers you in a particular direction, then the design and build will necessarily need to follow that.

Having said that there are aspects of even large commercial websites that are basically off-the-shelf. For example, unless you're Amazon you're not going to invent your own e-commerce solution, so most major retailers customise a Shopify or Hybris offering.

[akirk]

Sebastian Tombs said:

In my agency we would always produce completely bespoke designs and code, and then fight with wordpress to implement them and work round its limitations. However, it's important to understand why we do this, because we're solving a particular set of problems that businesses might have.

out of interest - why do you then 'fight with wordpress'
why not take a different approach? Wordpress has its place, but also it has a lot of limitations...

[Altrezia]

Yah seems odd to write bespoke "code" and then shove it in wordpress. Just ditch it.

We don't do wordpress, though nothing against it really. It's good at what it does, it's just we don't really offer what it does.

[Sebastian Tombs]

akirk said:

Sebastian Tombs said:

In my agency we would always produce completely bespoke designs and code, and then fight with wordpress to implement them and work round its limitations. However, it's important to understand why we do this, because we're solving a particular set of problems that businesses might have.

out of interest - why do you then 'fight with wordpress'
why not take a different approach? Wordpress has its place, but also it has a lot of limitations...

Actually most of the time we wouldn't use WP. It would be AEM, Episerver, Umbraco, Sitecore for the more full-featured stuff.
It's a question of scope, time and budget. So for example the last WP site we did was a fairly simple campaign site with about 6 templates and a few whizzy bits, but it needed to be content-editable, by a team already used to using WP. So we did it in WP and used Advanced Custom Fields and GraphQL with a React front-end. Not sure the GraphQL component was really necessary or offered any improvement over doing it with traditional WP templates to be honest. But hindsight is 20:20.

[akirk]

Sebastian Tombs said:

akirk said:

Sebastian Tombs said:

In my agency we would always produce completely bespoke designs and code, and then fight with wordpress to implement them and work round its limitations. However, it's important to understand why we do this, because we're solving a particular set of problems that businesses might have.

out of interest - why do you then 'fight with wordpress'
why not take a different approach? Wordpress has its place, but also it has a lot of limitations...

Actually most of the time we wouldn't use WP. It would be AEM, Episerver, Umbraco, Sitecore for the more full-featured stuff.
It's a question of scope, time and budget. So for example the last WP site we did was a fairly simple campaign site with about 6 templates and a few whizzy bits, but it needed to be content-editable, by a team already used to using WP. So we did it in WP and used Advanced Custom Fields and GraphQL with a React front-end. Not sure the GraphQL component was really necessary or offered any improvement over doing it with traditional WP templates to be honest. But hindsight is 20:20.

fair points
did sound slightly different!

[buggalugs]

petemurphy said:

agencies / web design people that sell wordpress sites - do they use frameworks, pre built themes / build their own?

always wondered as is there any need to code for most sme sites these days?

do they use frameworks like genesis or build from scratch. do they just buy a theme that matches the clients requirements and change them or build from scratch? do they use themes like generatepress or things like elementor?

why would you code from scratch these days? whats the done thing?

pls discuss

I help a few agencies out with wordpress hosting and liaise with developers. It varies from developer to developer. Some are st hot and will write a custom theme for each brieif and make it look very easy. These generally fit the brieif very closely and won't need 10,000 plugins to get the functionality and will give a fast maintainable website. These devs will know php, html and css inside out. Some do just use prebuilt themes, with pagebuilder/composer type stuff, they get to know one or two of the big common themes really well and can do a lot with it quickly. But it'll need good caching and will end up using more plugins, which will also need updating (along with the big ass theme) going forwards, whilst hopefully not breaking anything leaving you to figure out who's going to pay the hours to fix it. You can also get to a point with generic themes where you're 95% of the way towards the brief but bending the theme to get the last 5% that the client is bhing about burns endless hours away. Swings & roundabouts.

So small biz website I'd say go theme and just accept that you're not going to get it pixel perfect to a design. Adjust your design to fit the budget. Big sites will end up less complicated starting from custom written themes (as long as the developer isn't st )

[akirk]

buggalugs said:

So small biz website I'd say go theme and just accept that you're not going to get it pixel perfect to a design. Adjust your design to fit the budget. Big sites will end up less complicated starting from custom written themes (as long as the developer isn't st )

or just don't use Wordpress
Wordpress has its place - but it is not the solution for custom-heavy systems for big sites...

[buggalugs]

akirk said:

buggalugs said:

So small biz website I'd say go theme and just accept that you're not going to get it pixel perfect to a design. Adjust your design to fit the budget. Big sites will end up less complicated starting from custom written themes (as long as the developer isn't st )

or just don't use Wordpress
Wordpress has its place - but it is not the solution for custom-heavy systems for big sites...

Oh yeah - for a given definition of 'big' - nobody's going to rewrite gov.uk in Wordpress

But if you're a business spending say < 10k on a website then Wordpress is gonna be close to an optimum solution most of the time.

Edited by buggalugs on Wednesday 21st August 18:05

[petemurphy]

Thanks some great answers here.

I ask as ive tinkered with selling sites before and may do so again. I can code but see other people just selling themes ( including agencies ) and wonder if theres any need to code from scratch. Or if a framework which one etc.

[48k]

buggalugs said:

Oh yeah - for a given definition of 'big' - nobody's going to rewrite gov.uk in Wordpress

You'd be surprised

Sidenote - joking aside, there isn't a single web platform behind gov.uk it's a whole hodgepodge. For example I'm currently working on a project for the DfE and some applications within it use Asp.Net Core and some use Ruby. All the code is opensource too - all on Github.

[petemurphy]

48k said:

You'd be surprised

Sidenote - joking aside, there isn't a single web platform behind gov.uk it's a whole hodgepodge. For example I'm currently working on a project for the DfE and some applications within it use Asp.Net Core and some use Ruby. All the code is opensource too - all on Github.

prob be better on wordpress!

[akirk]

buggalugs said:

akirk said:

buggalugs said:

So small biz website I'd say go theme and just accept that you're not going to get it pixel perfect to a design. Adjust your design to fit the budget. Big sites will end up less complicated starting from custom written themes (as long as the developer isn't st )

or just don't use Wordpress
Wordpress has its place - but it is not the solution for custom-heavy systems for big sites...

Oh yeah - for a given definition of 'big' - nobody's going to rewrite gov.uk in Wordpress

But if you're a business spending say < 10k on a website then Wordpress is gonna be close to an optimum solution most of the time.

I suspect that for many SMEs £10k would be a big spend and would buy quite a good alternative to wordpress for most companies

For most small businesses, actually the real cost of Wordpress is in maintaining it / managing plugin conflicts etc. and very often they are better off with a static site and paying the development company to update it - there are a lot of wordpress sites out there which are out of date and not being updated - the ability for a non-technical user to be able to update the site is wasted...

If more websites were built based on the business's actual needs, I suspect we would see a lot less of Wordpress

petemurphy said:

Thanks some great answers here.

I ask as ive tinkered with selling sites before and may do so again. I can code but see other people just selling themes ( including agencies ) and wonder if theres any need to code from scratch. Or if a framework which one etc.

I think that you can do a lot of website selling with wordpress with no coding - whether you then have the knowledge to sort out issues / customise the site as needed is another matter... We do quite a lot of business sorting out websites for businesses where the company they went to first just sold them wordpress and a theme, but didn't really know how to support them / sort out issues. Only you know what level of skill you have...

[petemurphy]

akirk said:

I think that you can do a lot of website selling with wordpress with no coding - whether you then have the knowledge to sort out issues / customise the site as needed is another matter... We do quite a lot of business sorting out websites for businesses where the company they went to first just sold them wordpress and a theme, but didn't really know how to support them / sort out issues. Only you know what level of skill you have...

what would you say is a better alternative at 10k mark out of interest? agree re the updating etc but thats the same of any website.

skill?!

[buggalugs]

akirk said:

buggalugs said:

akirk said:

buggalugs said:

So small biz website I'd say go theme and just accept that you're not going to get it pixel perfect to a design. Adjust your design to fit the budget. Big sites will end up less complicated starting from custom written themes (as long as the developer isn't st )

or just don't use Wordpress
Wordpress has its place - but it is not the solution for custom-heavy systems for big sites...

Oh yeah - for a given definition of 'big' - nobody's going to rewrite gov.uk in Wordpress

But if you're a business spending say < 10k on a website then Wordpress is gonna be close to an optimum solution most of the time.

I suspect that for many SMEs £10k would be a big spend and would buy quite a good alternative to wordpress for most companies

For most small businesses, actually the real cost of Wordpress is in maintaining it / managing plugin conflicts etc. and very often they are better off with a static site and paying the development company to update it - there are a lot of wordpress sites out there which are out of date and not being updated - the ability for a non-technical user to be able to update the site is wasted...

If more websites were built based on the business's actual needs, I suspect we would see a lot less of Wordpress

petemurphy said:

Thanks some great answers here.

I ask as ive tinkered with selling sites before and may do so again. I can code but see other people just selling themes ( including agencies ) and wonder if theres any need to code from scratch. Or if a framework which one etc.

I think that you can do a lot of website selling with wordpress with no coding - whether you then have the knowledge to sort out issues / customise the site as needed is another matter... We do quite a lot of business sorting out websites for businesses where the company they went to first just sold them wordpress and a theme, but didn't really know how to support them / sort out issues. Only you know what level of skill you have...

Oh yes a lot of SME's will be looking for something around the £500 quid mark with £2 a month hosting and then want chasing for the payment for months, before demanding endless free ammends because it's not right. I think for people with a decent turnover, an actual marketing plan and budget 10k might be nothing. The 10K isn't all going on coding and images it's going on thinking and planning to optimise ROI. Whereas with a £500 website that IS all going on coding and a few stock images. If you know how to tie in to a bigger picture and get maximum ROI you aren't wasting your time doing £500 websites.

Wordpress is easy to do a lot with relatively little knowledge that's the main reason for it's popularity. From a technical / hosting point of view the main things I hate about it are tied in with the ease of updating and changing, to work it requires all the permissions to be wide open, add that to poor quality 'anyone can do it' code and it's no wonder it's such a big easy target for hackers. Ideally all the CMS type stuff would be locked away and would just generate the site statically when you publish, like some of the bigger CMS's do. Fast, not much to hack. Wordpress is a dumpster fire in comparison. But it's easy and popular and everyone knows it.

[akirk]

petemurphy said:

akirk said:

I think that you can do a lot of website selling with wordpress with no coding - whether you then have the knowledge to sort out issues / customise the site as needed is another matter... We do quite a lot of business sorting out websites for businesses where the company they went to first just sold them wordpress and a theme, but didn't really know how to support them / sort out issues. Only you know what level of skill you have...

what would you say is a better alternative at 10k mark out of interest? agree re the updating etc but thats the same of any website.

skill?!

We do a variety of solutions - for the majority of websites costing in the ballpark of £10k they will have bespoke processes so they are likely to get a bespoke website. We have our own CMS we developed to be very modular - so it has core modules, and then we add bespoke ones as required. If the needs are more specialised then there may be a solution in Shopify or BigCommerce etc.

But we have a long history in writing our own code - we have more issues with libraries of code / software like Wordpress than writing our own, so it is often the more robust solution...

[jimboj]

Altrezia said:

Yah seems odd to write bespoke "code" and then shove it in wordpress. Just ditch it.

What's wrong with bespoke php code that adds to WP functionality to produce a better bespoke solution?

[ging84]

buggalugs said:

Oh yeah - for a given definition of 'big' - nobody's going to rewrite gov.uk in Wordpress

But if you're a business spending say < 10k on a website then Wordpress is gonna be close to an optimum solution most of the time.

I've worked on a few, but generally drupal is more favoured