Why Not All WordPress Sites Are Created Equal

WordPress is a powerful and awesome bit of software. But not all WordPress sites are created equal.

You may be surprised to know how much a good developer can customize WordPress. There’s so much flexibility with WordPress that one client’s view of the dashboard may look entirely different from another.  And why it’s almost impossible to tell if a website runs WordPress from its design.

And then there are plugins. Because WordPress is open source software (free, and can be added onto and extended by others) it means that thousands of developers are writing extensions or add-ons that others can download and plug into the core of WordPress.

Why plugins are cool

At the present time there are 26,831 plugins for download on the official WordPress site alone! They address all kinds of challenges that sites may encounter from ecommerce, to mapping, to SEO, to making your site ready for mobile, to handling your Twitter feed. And it means that the development community can share code to handle many of these things.

It all sounds so “plug and play” doesn’t it? Well it’s a bit more complicated that that because not all plugins play well together or like the server they’re on and that’s where working with an experienced developer pays dividends.  And many plugins require configuration to take them where we need them go.

Custom design vs. themes

Themes are another big deal in the WordPress community and the proliferation of themes (pre-designed and coded templates for WordPress to plunk your content into) is good news for a number of web producers with less experience and for clients whose budgets are limited.

But just like heating up a can of Chef Boyardee doesn’t make you a chef, downloading a theme doesn’t make you a web designer or developer.

While there are some lovely themes available today, we work with our clients to develop a plan to addresses their specific marketing needs, their audience, what the site must accomplish and suggest to them innovative ideas that perhaps they didn’t know existed.

We feel that searching for a theme template that could begin to address your needs would flip the creation and innovation phase on its head as we suggest solutions that conform to the theme instead of your needs driving the design.

And quite honestly, does a theme that’s been downloaded 10,000 times sound like it’s going to differentiate your business?

We’ve been building websites since 1998 and have embraced the progression of the web along the way acquiring a tremendous amount of skill and experience. We’ll bet on our own code over someone else’s any day and our clients know you get what you pay for.

Kelly Patchet

Kelly is a co-founder of GK Media and has been a web content expert and website strategist since 1997.