Hmmm Wordpress huh?

[Sticky]

Hi guys,

I have recently been introduced to wordpress and the ease at which it can not only create but give pointers to creating good websites. Now, i'm thinking it may be a bit of a dirty word around here because it simplifies the true blood, sweat and tears of "web design" and to some extent web development.

I just wanted to know what you all think of using this approach to designing pages for clients.

I'm somewhat in the middle (from the little I have learnt) about wordpress. By that I mean, with the ease of calling up code for such things as forms, I can see how it would be a usefull tool. However, it just seems all to easy and for that reason something usually has to suffer? I'm begining to on my road to becoming a web designer/developer and from my minimal experience it seems almost threatening to the career I want. What I mean by that is, if anyone can do it then "our" craft value diminishes.

Just wondering really wanting opinions and provoking discussion. what's good what's bad etc.

Cheers

Sticky

[DesignerScott]

Not a dirty word around here. (At least not like pancake!) As long as people realize that its just a CMS tool, there's nothing wrong with it, and many designers survive by creating wordpress designs. (And some posers still do it for $2/hr)
Hopefully some other people will back me up on that, but what do I know, I still prefer doing everything in flash/actionscript! So I don't have to put up with Internet Exploder changing my layout!

[Patrick Shannon]

Nothing wrong with WordPress at all. As Designer Scott said, it's basically a CMS and nothing more. It really doesn't differ too much from designing any other kind of regular website with an editable CMS, and WordPress gives you decent freedom to do much with regular HTML layout and CSS. They may give the user power to edit, but that doesn't mean the user has the ability to put a pretty, unique and effective face on it.

Case in point, one of my clients hired me to redesign their WordPress blog redesigned. It's at www. thebeautifulkind .com (remove spaces). (WARNING, NSFW)

[Drazan]

Wordpress, Joomla, Gallery, Expression Engine (PMachine), and any numberous CMS and E-commerce carts are all just tools to assist the end user.

I use them, Nike uses Expression Engine in their soccor portal. The design and programming (for the custom tweaks), extra pages and even so much as just installing the program are what the customers hire us for.

I've been a part of the open source community for 7 years or more, there's always work designing using these applications.

Jade

[Cyan_Ide]

I personally am really into WP. I think it gets really powerful once you get past the initial functionality of it and start digging into how it operates on the database level and such. Once I started figuring that part out, it became more of a 'what can Wordpress do for me' sort of situation. For me it acts as a really powerful backbone on which I can build a dynamic, easily editable site. It becomes more about how I can focus on making a site which is really dynamic, or I can focus more on the design, because the foundation has already been laid before.

I don't know about anyone else, but I have spent as much energy altering the functionality of WP to make it do what I want it to as I have doing other website design and development activities, so I tend to disagree with those who say it takes away from the 'blood, sweat, and tears of web design.'

Besides, if that's the case, we web designers would need a transfusion whenever we make a web site thanks to having to test in good old Internet Explorer.

[MikeTheVike]

I don't think its a bad thing to use Wordpress. We've used it here for a couple sites that are not blogs. I know html/css, but I don't know php, so it definitely helps me out.

I also heard Drupal is pretty good, but haven't tried it out. drupal.org

[Drazan]

Drupal is an excellent CMS with a good world-wide support and development team.

However, it is not user friendly to set up. It would be a challenge even for the intermediate user. The CMS itself is only a structure in which you can add in the modules that make it work for you. I would guess at 40 to 60 hours just to get the bones of a site running, and more depending on which modules are installed.

If you wanted to dive in to Drupal, you'll be rewarded if you finish. But i've found that other CMS work just as well for the sites I do without the hours invested in setup.