

What is the Best CMS?
There is no shortage of content management systems available for website design and development. There is also no shortage of bigotry when it comes to which CMS is best to use. There still remain puritans who swear by coding the website and building it all from the floorboards upwards. It will be truly unique and do whatever you need it to but in 2022 you can probably already get most of the work already done from a themed template website which is already mobile responsive and there are options for eCommerce and brochure site alike.
WordPress
WordPress. Let’s start right here. There are some designers who swear by WordPress and they are so brand loyal that if you were to break them open somehow, they would say “WordPress” all the way through them like sticks of seaside rock. They love WordPress. On toast. For them, it is better than bacon. For some people that means it’s not that good. (Like Simon who hasn’t eaten meat for 35 years) and for others it means it is almost impossible to ever be that brilliant. (Like Spence, who hasn’t eaten bacon for 35 minutes, and misses it already.) It’s all about personal choices and its totally fluid and subjective.
What People Love About WordPress
- Interface – When first installed, it’s a user friendly CMS
- Appearance – the display framework for your website pages is mature and stable and easy to customise and there are literally thousands of themes out there to take a lot out of the heavy lifting out of web design
- It’s Free – it really is, installing WordPress on your own server is free. WordPress will also host your website for free
- Plugins – so you can perform any number of functions
- Support – 30% of the world’s web developers work in WordPress working on patches, fixes and updates all the time. The online community is huge
- SEO friendly – the WordPress CMS is all about the user experience which search engines love, it’s also mobile responsive, quick to load and really easy to optimise images. Not to mention they have SEO plugins a plenty.
- WordPress Hosting – there is hosting available which is tailored specifically for WordPress websites.
What’s not to love?
… well, since you ask …
What People Hate About WordPress
- Security – With such a large user base to exploit, it’s the Devil’s Playground for Hackers. If you own a WordPress website, you need to be aware that regular security patches need to be applied (for which your provider may charge you).
- 75% are from WordPress plugins
- 14% are from core WordPress
- 11% are from WordPress theme
- Appearance – seen one WordPress site? You’ve seen them all. Themes are inconsistent and can be generic. It really does take skill and talent to stop a WordPress from looking, well, WordPressy.
- Interface – As you add functionality, the administrator’s interface can become dispersed and it can become less and less obvious how to do what and where.
- Creeping costs
- Freemium upsells. The theme providers, yoast, elementor and just about everyone in the WordPress game are all about the upsells. Yes, you can have a free version that does just about enough to make you wish you had it all available to you.
- Premium upsells. Your business is running great online and many of those plugin providers will want a slice of the action – expect paid plugins to edge up their prices as your website becomes busier.
- Bloat. All those lovely themes, plugins and images you installed to get your website just so sweet? They can crash your website, slow your website down and cause a raft of reliability issues.
- Time Updates, updates and more updates. It’s just not quite enough to plug in an play with WordPress. It’s more a case of plug in, play and then spend a lot of time updating plugins
Not that any of this is insurmountable with good practice and regular maintenance and updates. Updates are good. Learn to embrace the updating. We know it’s boring. In fact, let us worry about that for you. We love that kind of boring. Rich finds it rather therapeutic, in his happy zen place updating WordPress plugins and updating security keys.
So the thing is that we aspire to not just be a Progressive Web Apps Agency, but we actually strive to be a progressive web design agency.. do you like what I did there? …
This is to mean that we want to equip you with the best solution to your problem and if we are only looking at custom website design and wordpress website design, then we are kind of fishing in a shallow pool when there are vast oceans of solutions out there .. at least, two .. maybe as many as three more which I am going to mention right here on this very post!
Squarespace
Well someone had to say it. Beloved of designers, architect and visual types, Squarespace is a great content management system for delivering a good looking website.
Squarespace websites are highly polished in their appearance with easy to navigate pages and a nice coherent user experience. They also have over 140 different templates to build from all of which can be customised.
Squarespace can implement ecommerce.
What People Love About Squarespace
- Appearance – with a “fanatical” team of developers, Squarespace template blocks can rapidly-built into great looking websites.
- Easy to Use – Squarespace really is easy to use. The admin interface is straightforward and consistent.
- Speed – the platorm is both quick to build and to run.
- Excellent Customer Service – another thing about which the company claim to be “fanatical”. If you’re in the UK, you will have to wait for New York to wake up before you can experience that service however.
What People Hate About Squarespace
- Cost – Squarespace is not free and extending it is not always cheap. Expect creeping costs.
- Appearance – Like many content managements systems, Squarespace websites can begin to look generic
- Rigid – Squarespace is hard to extend, if it doesn’t happen to do what you want then there’s almost no way to make it do so.
There are complaints too (in the name of being balanced and impartial, like the BBC) surrounding Squarespace sites in that they only have one sub navigation which is a limiting factor on building a website with deep menu hierarchy, and it pretty much puts the kybosh on creating a multilingual website.
… in Conclusion
So as you can hopefully see by now, we have no dog in any one fight. It’s almost like we know that just as a good pub has handpull beer and also draught via the mast heads on the bar, and then there’s the fridges, the optics, the wine list and even a coffee machine these days .. same thing really but for websites and content management systems. They are all tools of the trade that we work in.
So going to a digital company who are going to evangelise just one CMS and poopoo the rest … is like having the nightmarishly laughable scenario that you hire a plumber who knows better than everyone else and he’s come to the conclusion (entirely by his own volition) that doesn’t like pipe wrenches.
He’s not too keen on adjustable spanners either. What he likes to use is a lump hammer. For everything.
It’s the same with content management systems, we like to ensure we are equipped with as many up to date and well maintained tools for jobs of all shapes and sizes that all come with their own set of problems that will require different applications and solutions and to have the right tools to apply to each accordingly.
We’d like to hope it makes more sense when you think of it like that.