Building a website has become crucial to having an online presence in the current digital era. Website development can be done with the help of WordPress or by creating websites from scratch using HTML coding. WordPress provides a number of benefits that make it a better option for individuals as well as businesses. On the other hand, HTML offers a strong basis for web development. We shall discuss further in this blog about WordPress or HTML coding.
User-Friendly Interface
WordPress’s user-friendly interface is one of its main advantages over HTML coding. It allows you to create, modify, and update your website’s content without the need for extensive coding experience. Instead of manually writing the code, you may make changes with its user-friendly visual editor using its drag-and-drop user interface. WordPress is a great option for non-technical users and beginners who wish to create and maintain their websites quickly.
Wide Range of Themes and Plugins
WordPress has a huge selection of plugins and themes that make customizing websites quite simple. You can choose from many free and paid themes that match your brand and customize them as necessary. Additionally, Through a vast plugin library, the website may be upgraded with a number of features such as contact forms, social media integration, SEO optimization, and more. These themes and plugins save time and effort by eliminating the need to create complex functions from scratch.
Responsive Design
It is essential to have a responsive website in today’s mobile-centric society. WordPress takes care of this issue by offering themes that are built from scratch up to be mobile-friendly. These themes automatically adjust the layout and content to ensure optimal viewing on different devices, including smartphones and tablets. The procedure of custom coding for various screen sizes is time-consuming when using HTML to achieve responsiveness. WordPress makes this easier by giving users access to pre-made responsive themes.
Scalability and Flexibility
Because of WordPress’ excellent scalability, your website can grow as the business does. If you need to add new pages, blog posts, or even a complete e-commerce business, it can meet your requirements. Its flexible architecture and plugin ecosystem enable you to extend the functionality of your website without extensive coding. This is a good option for companies of all kinds, from startups to major corporations, according to its scalability and versatility.
Community Support and Updates
WordPress is supported by a vibrant and engaged community of users, designers, and developers who constantly work to enhance it. Because of its community-driven nature, it is updated frequently with security fixes and feature upgrades, keeping your website safe and current. Furthermore, it’s simple to get solutions to any queries or problems you might run into during the development process with regards to the amount of online documentation, tutorials, and forums.
Thus, WordPress has a number of benefits that make it a better option for the majority of website design needs, even though creating websites from scratch using HTML has its advantages. WordPress is preferred over HTML coding because of its user-friendly interface, extensive library of themes and plugins, responsive design features, scalability, and active community. Whether you are a beginner or professional developer, it allows a robust and effective framework for creating and maintaining websites without the need for extensive coding skills. Therefore, WordPress is without a doubt the way to go if you’re trying to quickly and easily develop a website.
Introduction to CMS
Your Content Management System (CMS) is the chassis of your content marketing campaign. A content management system (CMS) is an application that allows you to create and run your website. There is an interface, an admin panel where you can design and update pages, posts. You can also arrange the content the way you want. CMS provides a reliable, protected and user-friendly interface to handle the contents of the database. CMS plays a crucial role in communicating your content to the target market. There is no benefit in having exceptional content if your CMS is incapable of handling it well.
Factors to consider the choice of CMS platform
While choosing a CMS platform, one must keep in mind the various factors involved. A decision is taken after analysing all the elements in detail.
● Impact on business
The effect that a CMS platform will have on the market requires in-depth analysis. The requirements vary for every organisation. Some CMS platforms are better in funnelling the leads, while specific CMS platforms like WordPress are better at showcasing the products, and help in marketing the products. If massive operations are required for the growth of the business, Drupal is the best choice.
● Cost incurred
The cost involved in maintaining a CMS varies from one to the other. Some CMS platforms like WordPress and Drupal are open-source platforms and are free to use. However, there are costs involved in buying plugins to customise the website as per your requirements. Other
CMS platforms like Sitecore and Kentico have paid plans and have more features. The point is to decide on your budget and needs before choosing to invest money on a CMS platform.
● Requirements of the platform
Different platforms have different types of server requirements. Also, some platforms might not be compatible with your existing technology stack. Launching a website is only the start. The need for regularly maintaining it is a significant point for consideration.
● Blogging
With the boom in content marketing, blogging has become a significant part of an organization’s growth. The CMS must handle blog posts well. The main factors to look for, while looking at the blogging aspect are:
1. User-friendly interface for writers with low technical skills
2. Smooth workflow management, and post scheduling options
3. Social Media Integrations
4. Availability of automation options
● Customisation
The ability to customise the CMS platform is the main pain point. Some CMS platforms do not offer personalization. Some platforms provide limited customisation with access to the codes, while some are fully customisable. YSIWYG is a trending factor. It means ‘What You See Is What You Get.’ It helps the designers to make visually appealing customisations.
● SEO and Marketing
Some CMS platforms offer built-in SEO modules. Also, a clean, customizable code is necessary for SEO. It is a form of art that takes in constant practice. Choosing the right CMS, such as WordPress will go a long way in driving organic traffic for your website. The ease of integration of marketing tools into your CMS is a central point of consideration. Various marketing tools, like Hubspot and Mailchimp, integrate well with WordPress.
● Support and Scalability
A CMS platform that provides constant support and training is the best choice. It is necessary to have a platform that supports scaling whenever you feel the need to expand. While planning for the current requirements, it is wise to anticipate future demands and prepare accordingly to scale. CMS platforms like Sitecore and Kentico offer scalability options.
Pros and Cons of each CMS
● WordPress
Pros:
Drupal is a free and open-source platform.
The plugins for WordPress are simple to use and are useful for SEO.
Wordpress has an excellent blogging option.
Strong performance due to minimal code and PHP.
Cons:
Prone to hacking and malware.
It requires planning of the website.
Hard to use custom layouts.
● Drupal
Pros:
Drupal is a free and open-source platform.
Drupal has options for easy scalability. It can be scaled as per the fluctuations in the traffic.
Drupal has flexible taxonomies that offer vast flexibility.
Multilingual functionality is built into the core of Drupal.
Drupal has robust security features.
Cons:
Drupal requires you to have strong coding skills and is relatively complicated to use.
Drupal has performance issues. The user has to put a lot of effort to improve the configurations.
Compatibility issues between the modules arise sometimes.
● Joomla!
Pros:
Joomla! is a free and open-source platform.
Joomla! has limited compatibility issues because it is scripted entirely in PHP.
Joomla! has an easy user interface which makes it adaptable and flexible.
Cons:
Joomla! is complicated to customise without coding knowledge.
Joomla! has limited availability of modules due to the small user base.
● Sharepoint
Pros:
Sharepoint has a lot of options for customisation and is highly customisable.
Sharepoint is integrated with Microsoft Office and can save a lot of time during collaboration.
Sharepoint allows you to build multiple layers of sites and create enterprising solutions for large organisations.
Cons:
The licence of Sharepoint is expensive, and it costs a lot to set it up and maintain it.
Sharepoint requires training to use it and isn’t intuitive.
● Sitecore
Pros:
Sitecore is a powerful platform with a great deal of flexibility.
Sitecore features support Enterprise-level requirements.
It is easy to use for non-developers.
Cons:
Sitecore has performance issues at times and becomes slow.
Sitecore is expensive for basic CMS needs.
● Kentico
Pros:
Kentico is easy to use, versatile, and robust.
Kentico supports scalability.
Kentico has constant updates where the features increase consistently.
Cons:
Kentico is expensive for general users.
It generally takes time to implement features in Kentico.
Conclusion
It’s hard to find a perfect CMS, and it’s easy to get lost in the number of choices. There are about 250 to 350 different applications available in the market. From simple building tools to expansive enterprise systems, the possibilities are endless. The question is what CMS requirements you will need to support your planned online project optimally.
Choosing the right CMS platform for your Business can be confusing or may leave you with too many choices. So, how do you make sure you are choosing the right one? Well, no matter which CMS platform you choose whether its Joomla, WordPress or Drupal they are all equally great. What can be achieved in one can be achieved in another. The only difference we see between them from a web development company’s point of view is the User Experience.
Upon asking our clients about their preferability, they all have one thing in common “The WordPress”. The reason? WordPress has a great User Experience and is a lot easier for our clients to grab on. They have no difficulty using it. Though, all our clients are active Web Masters. Constantly making content updates to their website.
If User Experience is not an only deciding factor for you then here’s a short comparison between the three widely used CMS platforms by our developer that will help you choose the right CMS platform for your business.
Joomla
Joomla! is a free and open-source content management system for publishing web content, developed by Open Source Matters, Inc. It is built on an MVC web application framework that can be used independently of the CMS.
Some of the core features Joomla offers:
- Ease of use – User Experience is cluttered
- Features – more suitable for community platform
- One click install – yes
- Number of plugins available – 32000+ modules
- eCommerce – yes
- SEO friendly – basic SEO
- Developer cost – $25-$50 per hour
- Easy to customize – requires an advanced level of programming knowledge
- Dedicated hosting available – yes
- easy to maintain – requires AMC
WordPress
WordPress is a widely used CMS platform with over 30% of the websites running on WordPress. WordPress was started as a blogging platform. Today, WordPress is preferred as a CMS platform capable of handling complex websites.
Some core features offered by WordPress:
- Ease of use – great user experience
- Features – best for small business websites
- One click install – yes
- Number of plugins available – 45000+ plugins
- eCommerce – yes
- SEO friendly – advance SEO
- Developer cost – $15-$30 per hour
- Easy to customize – plugins available for all kind of customizations
- Dedicated hosting available – yes
- Easy to maintain – requires AMC
Drupal
Drupal is most suitable for large and complex websites. It is the second most popular CMS platform, powering 8% of the websites. It’s extremely powerful and less resource intensive.
Some core features offered by Drupal:
- Ease of use – requires technical expertise
- Features – best suitable for enterprise-level Business
- One click install – yes
- Number of plugins available -7000+ extensions
- eCommerce – yes and no
- SEO friendly – good SEO
- Developer cost – $25-$50 per hour
- Easy to customize – an advance level of programming knowledge is required
- Dedicated hosting available – yes
- Easy to maintain – requires AMC
As a WordPress development company from India, whenever we have a proposal for our clients with a recommendation of using WordPress as a CMS platform, we have a question that is being asked by our clients, is WordPress secure?
To figure out what is the best way to answer the question and to explain why WordPress is recommended, how powerful and user-friendly CMS platform it is, and how it can be secured by installing right plugins and following basic provisions we decided to write a Blog.
We thought writing a blog would be a good idea on this topic. So, whenever we have the question being asked, we can simply share this blog post with our clients to guide them and to educate them on how their WordPress website can be secured.
Here are some tips from our WordPress Experts on how to keep your WordPress website secure and away from the bad boys.
Never set admin as username:
first and foremost, never use admin or your company name as a username. Using common usernames can put you at risk. Be creative, try different usernames that aren’t easy to guess. Set uncommon usernames. To find out how to delete the default admin user account please go to our blog post at How To Delete “Admin” WordPress’s Default User Account?
Change the Database prefix:
WordPress uses wp_ prefix for its database table names by default. Using default database prefix can let the hackers easily guess the full name of any database table. You can change the database prefix to something else while installing the WordPress.
Be protected, Install a Firewall:
This is the best and easiest way to prevent your WordPress website from hacking attacks. As of today, Sucuri is one of the best Firewall paid plugin available for WordPress CMS out there. If you aren’t willing to spend and still want your website to be protected then we recommend using Wordfence’s free plugin available at WordPress repository. This plugin is powerful enough to protect your website from almost all sorts of hacking attacks. Configuring Wordfence is very easy and straightforward.
Keep your website backed up:
Even though we have taken all the necessary measures to keep the WordPress website secured, we can never be 100% sure that nothing bad will happen. Hackers are smart and one step forward in planning. Having a regular backup of your website can help you restore it quickly if there has been an irreversible damage done by the hackers.
Do you have broken website URLs? Is it costing you to let your traffic land on dead pages? If YES, we have good news for you.
We recently revamped and migrated a website to a WordPress CMS. The website had several pages crawling in organic search. The guys have worked really hard to get the pages listed in the organic search. We did not want their efforts to go in Vain.
As a web development company, we could have redirected it by modifying .htaccess file, but we wanted to keep it easy for the client to manage in future. So as always we started searching for a plug-in library on WordPress. After going through a whole lot of plug-in’s, we got hold of this amazing plug-in called “Redirection”, as simple as it sounds. Download it from http://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/
Once downloaded, Install it, go to settings and create the Source and Targeted URL with Type: Simple Redirection and 301 Method. Source URL is the broken URL from Google and the targeted URL is the URL you want your user redirected to. Aint it really easy? Hope this post saves your time!
In the older versions of WordPress, you had no option to change WordPress’s default username “Admin” to something else during the installation procedure. This has been changed from Version 3.0 and higher. So if you are still using the older version of WordPress, how do you actually change the default username from Admin to something you like?
Here are some very easy steps,
- Login to your WordPress admin
- Under dashboard click Users > Add New (you will find it under the left side navigation)
- Name your new user and set a strong password. Generate one with Strong Password Generator if you can’t come up with one on your own.
- Under Role select Administrator.
- Click Add New User button to finish adding a new user.
- Now log out and re-login with the new user account. The one you just created.
- Again under Dashboard click Users > All Users, it will show you a list of current users.
- Roll over on Admin and hit Delete
- If you have blog posts written for this account, it will ask you to attribute the posts to the other account. Please select a new user for Attribute ‘all posts to’ and hit confirm the deletion.
The default user Admin is now deleted and is no longer available for the bad boys to hack.