Developing Websites with WordPress

Building and Maintaining Websites with WordPress

Building websites has two different components to consider: the experience of the front-end user actually visiting the website and the experience of the individual maintaining the back-end of the website. What often gets lost is the latter of the two. When developing a complete website, it’s often necessary to make an easy interface for someone to maintain without too much technical difficulty. One way to overcome the issue is to utilize the WordPress platform as your website’s primary back-end. There are a few issues that one should consider, however, before joining the millions who use WordPress daily for their websites.

First off, WordPress is a great open source and free platform to use. It is easily flexible for the experienced developer and is intuitive for those with minimal tech experience. Essentially, there’s nothing you can’t do with a standard website that one couldn’t do with a WordPress website. The back-end is instinctive, easy to use, and has a well-documented knowledgebase.

Despite these inherent advantages, however, there remain some core changes one has to make to WordPress in order to make it a truly viable option. The platform operates based upon themes, which makes perfect sense for those who do not know how to build a site but which have their own shortcomings. Themes typically have their own little quirks, a strict layout (without tearing the code absolutely apart), and security issues. At our website design house, we always use child themes as a way to fully customize the front-end, while adding additional security to the overall site.

Another issue with WordPress that any developer must deal with is security. Because of its widespread popularity, the platform is inherently the target of malware and other nasty security concerns. One of the easiest ways to combat this is to subtly change the fields in the WordPress database and rename the core files. Of course, to make many of these changes the technical expertise needed rises a bit and a familiarity with mySQL is strongly encouraged.

Finally, plugins are often essential components that make a site unique and modern. But it’s imperative to use them sparsely and only when absolutely necessary. Delete old, inactive plugins which pose a security threat. It’s easy to overlook plugin usage as your site grows, yet they can slow down your site’s performance and add a bunch of junk to your site’s code.

Overcoming these basic obstacles should position your WordPress website to grow and flourish for some time. The platform itself is great for SEO, makes the transfer from a website design company to a client a breeze, and provides a suitable design platform to work within.