A R Website Design
WordPress is a fantastic content management system, offering the end user flexibility and scope to design and create a website perfect for their business. With endless amounts of themes/designs available for the user to choose from, the choices for design are immense. Plus the finished product, if set up correctly, can look absolutely stunning. Sounds perfect and best of all, it can allow you to make a website that is friendly on the wallet. However, purchasing a theme/design has its downsides......
WordPress themes/designs can be fairly easy to make, especially once the first groundwork has been done. This means designers can create several hundreds of themes and make money from selling them, making it look easy to ‘create your own website’ and at a fraction of the cost of a designer. In order to keep customers safe, Wordpress has regular updates and each theme/design/plugin needs to update with it. What happens when the designer of that theme/design you have chosen decides to stop maintaining it and ultimately it as a whole or a section of it doesn’t update? This can crash your website completely, make certain parts not work and at best, look unpleasant to the eye. All of these scenarios leave you with a lot of work to do and no doubt, a large headache, which you will want to avoid. Sites built like this have a ticking timer going on in the background as without you knowing, one day it might just ‘stop’ working.
We often get enquiries from potential customers that start off by asking “do you work with WordPress?”, to which we answer “yes”… the next sentence sometimes starts off along the lines of “oh that’s great, my current website needs a revamp but first, its not actually working, the page just brings up an error”. This is usually caused by a website being left for a few months dormant and then either an auto update happens within WordPress, to which the design is no longer compatible with OR the customer decides to update it themselves not realising the theme/design isn’t compatible with the latest version and it breaks.
What often tends to be the case with purchased themes is that they usually contain third party plugins, written by developers who are not associated with the designers of the theme. They come part and parcel of the package and at the beginning, it all works brilliantly. As time goes on, all it takes is for one of these developers to stop updating the plugin so it no longer becomes compatible and it can bring the whole website down.
That’s why when we build a website, we create our own themes/designs. We start completely from scratch, working with the client to get their desired look and feel to their dream website. Ultimately, we can achieve something that not only the client is happy with, but also something safe from crashing when WordPress updates. There are some brilliant plugins out there written professionally for WordPress and these are used by many web designers, including ourselves. However as we’re working daily in this field, we know and opt for the reputable plugins that are written by big development companies. This allows us to get maximum functionality with minimal worry.
We all know that having a website for your business is important but that has to balance with the weight of your wallet too. The lure of a cheaper site can be a large driving force but do remember that the lifespan of that site will be limited and could cause you a major problem in the future, usually exactly when you don’t need it.
Having a professional develop your site gives you not only long term stability but we’re always on hand to help you out too. If you’re looking to get your website updated or just want some general advice, please feel free to get in touch and we will do our best to help you.
Email; enquiries@arwebsitedesign.co.uk
Phone; 07564 920055