If you haven’t heard of WordPress, you have almost certainly interacted with it on a daily basis. As a website content management platform, WordPress is reported to power a staggering 25% of all the websites on the internet in 2016. The basic idea behind WordPress as a framework is that it’s an open source, free to use and customize content management system (CMS) that is flexible and feature-rich.

And because of this, it is a double edged sword.

Form and Function

Because of the popularity and accessibility WordPress offers, it is nearly always the top choice of many web developers today. It’s easy to deploy and can rapidly bring a website up from scratch. The rub here is that for many business owners, it’s very difficult to tell the quality of a website on the surface.

Pre-made templates

Many times, a web developer will sell a client a custom-tailored website as part of their proposal. In reality, the developer will go purchase a $50 web template from a theme developer, customize bits and pieces of it and hand it to the client as a custom-tailored final website. Sometimes the particular developer in question may not even realize there is another way to do it.

• Specifically ask if the theme was purchased and then customized, or made from scratch.
• Find out if the company outsourced the site to someone else. This isn’t always a problem as they might very well be finding talented developers to handle overflow. But if they are sending your project to India or China to a development farm, this will almost certainly become a problem later.
• Ask how many hours they typically spend on their website development projects similarly scoped to yours. If they can easily work 40 hours or more, that is a good indication that they are spending the necessary time to create something that is high quality.

These qualifying questions can provide at least a basis to understand what kind of developer you are working with and what sort of quality you can expect from the final product.

Your Website Is an Important Part of Your Company

Poorly crafted websites can be a costly problem down the road to fix. This isn’t always the case, but it does happen.

The sites that Boundless creates are 100% tailored made. When we do choose WordPress for your project, it’s because it is clearly the best solution on the table to fit the needs of our client. The theme that we use is made from scratch, tailored to each client, and is built with your specific needs in mind.

This provides a faster, more secure website that requires fewer plugins to work. Most often, we’re utilizing WordPress’ built in core features to achieve the functionality we want, rather than relying on 3rd party plugins to handle it. The end result also provides a much easier website to work on, add features and grow as our clients needs grow.