WordPress Themes for business – good and bad

…and what you need to know.

If you have ever managed or updated your website, then you have probably used WordPress, and if you haven’t you probably know what it is as it is the backbone of approximately 64 million websites. It really is a great CMS (Content Management System) for small to medium sized websites that act as ‘brochures’ for the company. Our clients love it and many insist that we use it for their projects. Its biggest advantage is that once you have been shown around you should be able to go to any other WordPress site and be able to update the content. So you can take back control of managing your site, if you want to make a change, you do not need to contact your developer. You can log in and do it straight away, saving you time and money.

WordPress has a huge community behind it, creating things for it and improving it. It is however made up of a number of different elements that when put together give you your website, which loosely speaking are;

  • WordPress CMS – This is the main CMS, all the backend stuff that does the heavy lifting. 
  • Themes – Visual templates that sit over the top of the site, and are what your users see, there are thousands of these, some are free, some are paid for, some are well made and some are not.
  • Plugins – Give you extra functionality beyond the base system, so if you want to be able to add Google Analytics, you add a plugin. If you want to add a shop, you can use a plugin.
  • Page Builders – These are not essential, but are effectively themes with a lot more options and are designed to make it easier to build your own site without needing any development skills.

So, finally we get to Divi, this is a really powerful page builder, with hundreds of templates, allowing you to develop a website quickly, which can give you a fantastic looking site more quickly and more cheaply than a custom built site.

The speed you can build a website with Divi is both a blessing and a curse. In the right hands you can get a really good website that is easy to manage and works properly. But in the wrong hands you can end up with a website that is hard to update, has lots of functions that do not work properly, and is really slow to load.

BUT

The person designing and building your site still needs to be an experienced web developer, they need to understand how to lay out a webpage, what plugins work well together (not all do) and most importantly, they need to be working to a plan and an agreed site map. Just because Divi itself is fast, doesn’t mean you can skip all of the initial planning you’d normally do on a well built website.

We are frequently asked to take over sites built by other companies, and on many occasions it is because they do not work properly, are slow to load or are hard to manage. We recently took one over that had 40+ plugins, including some that conflicted with each other (on most websites you would not expect to have more than 10 or 20 plugins).

In Summary, like so many things in life, experience counts! We have built thousands of websites using WordPress and Divi. If you want a great new website at a great price, talk to the experts, talk to us.