Ten years ago, when Website Express was first started, we utilized almost every CMS (Content Management System) platform out there. The determining factor always depended on the client’s budget, needs, and the available functionality plugins that fit those needs. We soon realized that managing a large customer base on multiple different types of technologies was never a suitable model for a large website design firm.
Since then we have taken the time and investment to build out our own servers, utilize our own custom CMS platform, maintain our own set of plugins for extended functionality called “addons”, and also have deployed a robust client management database and portal.
As a result, we now have a platform and system that customers love, is easy for us to keep secure and up to date, deploy custom websites on, and manage internally.
While we are very happy with our system, and have left all those open source CMS’s behind, we still get requests to work on WordPress websites occasionally.
So, here are the top reasons why we don’t work on WordPress websites or any other CMS for that matter anymore.
Single Installation Software – Most CMS software like WordPress is single installation software. Meaning every website built gets its own software installation, database and widget installations. This is fine if you are only maintaining a couple of websites. Now, ask what happens when you try to maintain hundreds of these websites, keeping the software up to date, on a variety of different host servers all using different widgets? Simply put, you can’t. It is a nightmare to manage to say the least, and is the top reason why we left these platforms behind.
Most Hacked CMS – WordPress is the most utilized website CMS software on the internet, therefore it is the most targeted by hackers. If your web company fails to login to your server and routinely update it and all the installed widgets, it is only a matter of time before your old installation gets exploited. Most web companies can’t manage a few CMS installation upgrades every month, much less hundreds.
Mission Critical Widgets Go Defunct to Quickly – One of the most frustrating things for both clients and website developers is nailing down a mission critical widget, deploying it on a website only to have it break when a new version of WordPress comes out. Then having to wait on the widget developer to release a new upgraded widget, if they ever do. If they don’t, then having to port all the data and functionality into a new widget and database tables because the company that built it went belly up. You would be surprised how many times this happens, and it is never a fun conversation to have with a customer because the only thing that solves it is additional time and money.
Customer Support Nightmare – With the advent of CMS driven websites, developers hoped that the average end-user would be able to get into the backend and use the admin interface to make easy changes to the content and images on the website themselves. Unfortunately, due to the complex coding demands of mobile responsive websites, and intricate website technologies this vision of easy updates never materialized. As a result, trying to have a non-technical customer login to a WordPress website and make changes themselves will only frustrate them and create endless customer support requests. What’s more is these change requests are often associated with hourly fees, which again just frustrates the end-user with all the bills for simple changes.
Companies that get trapped on WordPress and other standard open source CMS’s typically get caught in these traps. In an effort to try and navigate these hurdles they often times end up cutting corners that should never be cut.
One thing we are seeing a lot of is companies are just buying WordPress themes and trying to pass these off as custom designs. If your company is not providing a from scratch design that can be modified and changed, that should be a huge red-flag as to their limited knowledge and abilities. Charging thousands of dollars for a modified template that they then cram your brand into is in our opinion unethical and a very disingenuous business practice seeing most companies don’t fit inside a website box.
We feel like Website Express has successfully navigated all of these issues with our system and setup and is why we have such a high customer retention rate.
Published on 2/8/2019 (5 years 76 days ago)