Few things you should think of before jumping into a wordpress website development
Out of the other open source content management systems wordpress is the one that is being used mostly. End users and developers love to use wordpress because of its simplicity. It is simple, yet a robust platform. It can be customized to any extent. Wordpress can be used to develop simple content driven website as well as very complex social network or ecommerce website. Though wordpress is highly customable any extendable, still you need to think few times, before you take the decision of developing your ecommerce or social network site using wordpress. If your requirement and need is simple then you may proceed with wordpress, but if you are thinking of adding more and more features to your project (even in future), then probably it will be better to use your project specific open source, for example, Zen Cart or Magento for ecommerce and Dolphin for social network. This is because these open sources are targeted to these particular platform, so obviously they come with all required modules / plugins and thus easy and quick to build and go live.
Wordpress is a pure content management system, where you can create the pages, menu items as your will and furnish the contents with text, images and videos. But remember that the content has to be edited via an HTML (WYSIWYG) editor. Though it says WYSIWYG, but it is really hard arranging the texts images and videos in a particular way and if you are not good at HTML, then probably you will not be able to do it at all, unless you are writing straight forward paragraph based contents. So if there is requirement of writing the texts in different blocks in a complex pattern, with different nice graphics and you are not good in doing HTML, then probably it is better to do a static HTML based website instead of trying wordpress as in static HTML based web pages, then web designer can do the pages any way you want it. But in case of wordpress you will have to stay within a particular boundary (in the sense of design and content layout).
So before jumping into a wordpress development, think of your needs properly, note down the basic or main pages that you require. Imagine a design layout, you don't have to be a graphic designer! You will have to think of the block lay out, just where and how to layout the different components. Because if you express this idea to the designer, then the job will be much quicker than asking the designer to design a layout based on few references.
Be steady with your choice of colour combinations. I have seen lots of people trying different layouts, different colour combinations, but at the end they come up with really a bad layout. So before jumping into the design, be steady with what you need and how you need it.
Wordpress has a huge library of plugins. So if you are thinking of adding few features on your website (like weather widget, news widget, photo gallery, facebook like, twitter feeds and so on), then note down the features or plugins you do need. You can search on wordpress library to find out suitable plugins or leave the job to the developer, but in both the cases you need to have the final goals defined. Take suggestions from the experienced wordpress developers to understand if using a plugin for a particular feature will be good, or it will give you pain in future.
So ultimately if you are familiar with wordpress and have good knowledge of wordpress plugins and HTML, then wordpress is your best friend for content driven site, but in case if you are new, then you must seek advice from a good wordpress development company like AM Infosystems.
Wordpress is a pure content management system, where you can create the pages, menu items as your will and furnish the contents with text, images and videos. But remember that the content has to be edited via an HTML (WYSIWYG) editor. Though it says WYSIWYG, but it is really hard arranging the texts images and videos in a particular way and if you are not good at HTML, then probably you will not be able to do it at all, unless you are writing straight forward paragraph based contents. So if there is requirement of writing the texts in different blocks in a complex pattern, with different nice graphics and you are not good in doing HTML, then probably it is better to do a static HTML based website instead of trying wordpress as in static HTML based web pages, then web designer can do the pages any way you want it. But in case of wordpress you will have to stay within a particular boundary (in the sense of design and content layout).
So before jumping into a wordpress development, think of your needs properly, note down the basic or main pages that you require. Imagine a design layout, you don't have to be a graphic designer! You will have to think of the block lay out, just where and how to layout the different components. Because if you express this idea to the designer, then the job will be much quicker than asking the designer to design a layout based on few references.
Be steady with your choice of colour combinations. I have seen lots of people trying different layouts, different colour combinations, but at the end they come up with really a bad layout. So before jumping into the design, be steady with what you need and how you need it.
Wordpress has a huge library of plugins. So if you are thinking of adding few features on your website (like weather widget, news widget, photo gallery, facebook like, twitter feeds and so on), then note down the features or plugins you do need. You can search on wordpress library to find out suitable plugins or leave the job to the developer, but in both the cases you need to have the final goals defined. Take suggestions from the experienced wordpress developers to understand if using a plugin for a particular feature will be good, or it will give you pain in future.
So ultimately if you are familiar with wordpress and have good knowledge of wordpress plugins and HTML, then wordpress is your best friend for content driven site, but in case if you are new, then you must seek advice from a good wordpress development company like AM Infosystems.
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