We are launching a news/media website called "Rewire Daily." We will offer daily articles on success, leadership, entrepreneurship, personal development, etc. Would it be better to use the WordPress platform for such a site, or should we have a custom site built from scratch?
Go for Wordpress initially.
-- Custom website will delay your launch plans considering all factors.
-- Wordpress can be used to meet your requirements from day 1.
-- Once you have enough visitors and decided the revenue model + business objective plan for a customized website to be developed from scratch.
I've been building web-applications for a super long time for a wide-range of customers, you don't want to get bogged down with building something, you'll have issues.
You're main goal should be focused on creating great content and working on relationships to build readership.
There is no point in creating a massive headache for yourself.
You say, "We're launching a news/media website". That means you don't know if its going to work. My opionion these days: I think SquareSpace is 'sexier'. It's going to look sexy out-of-the-box with very little modifications and a monkey can edit the site since it's so easy. Save yourself a headache and go with SquareSpace, please.
A custom site will probably load faster.
A Wordpress site will likely be quicker to put together. Plugins will make things like security easier.
A custom site will cost more.
So it comes down to:
Who will be creating the site? You or someone else?
How long can you wait for it?
How much can you afford to invest?
I think the 1 liner answer to your question is "it depends upon your project specs and the allocated budget"
My major specialty is SEO. And for all of my clients, I'm responsible to keep their websites 100% user friendly and hence search engine friendly too.
So based on my 5 years of experience (at oDesk.com) I'd strongly recommend you go after Wordpress. It has several reasons!
Let me share an amazing reason here-under:
"Once I've heard from a big Internet Marketing name, that using Wordpress as a CMS is one of the 200 rankings signals that Google uses to estimate a website's rank"
We can't blindly say it's true or it's false, but it makes sense when we focus on a main Google's guidelines. Google recommends using a CMS that's easy to use/manage.
As you're going to share news mostly, so it'l cost you much to upload your content, as every time either you've to hire someone for that, or pay for some online course to learn that CMS. Means a lot of tensions!
In wordpress, to manage a lot of the things, most of the plugins are free and easy to use. Just chose a best template for your niche and hire a designer/developer for one time project to make your desired layouts.
Run free tools like GTMetrix.com to optimize the website speed. There are some plugins as well.
But while using wordpress, pay a lot of the attention on your website's security. Wordpress websites are often hacked.
Feel free contacting me to know more about it!
Have a nice time!
Hi there,
We're asked about this all the time. While there are a few factors that will come into play, one of the more important ones to consider at this junction is who will be updating the site on an ongoing basis and how much experience do they have doing so?
If you are planning to have the authors submit and post their articles directly, it would most likely make sense to use Wordpress. If your authors happen to know a bit more than the average person about simple html and css coding, then a custom site might be in order.
But, to really get to the heart of the issue, we'd need to talk a little further about your big picture goals and objectives for Rewire Daily, and then see which of these options is going to better support those objectives. If you'd like to chat a bit further we can set up a quick call. Hope this helps!
Seems like what you are asking is should you use a WordPress template to build a site or building a site not using a template.
It all depends on your budget but if budget allows and you are serious about making your site unique and want to avoid the possibility that someone else might be using the same WordPress template, then build a custom site.
You can use WordPress as a CMS tool to build a custom site. Just because you are using WordPress, it does not mean you have to use a pre-made WordPress template. We have designed and built many sites using WordPress as the platform and each site is not built using any templates.
The practical answer is go witt wordpress and pick a theme that adjusts to your designs. Woothemes is a great source plus you will have the significant advantage of getting plugins that will help you with SEO and not have to call a designer every single time you want to post an article.
Launching as quickly as possible is often better than going for perfection because you are able to gauge much quicker what your audience wants and how they respond. If ultimately you find tremendous success wordpress will allow you to scale with add-ons and special services.
I very much agree with Bakul Kaushik, you will save time and money.
Others talked about security, I use Cloudflare. $20/mth gives you a CDN and Security.
Make sure you have people who can support the underlying system for Wordpress... ie; Linux, Sendmail/Postfix, MySQL
have fun and good luck in your venture.
Aneil
We have been building large traffic and content solutions on top of WordPress for years. WordPress will excel both in your initial phase, saving time and costs for building a decent solution, and your growth scaling. Some of the largest news websites are built on top of WordPress, since it started as a blogging platform.
Example lists:
http://vip.wordpress.com/clients/
http://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/40-most-notable-big-name-brands-that-are-using-wordpress/
WordPress is popular enough to support a large number of services out of the box (with plugins).
There are plenty of managed WordPress hosting solutions such as SiteGround that are optimized for WordPress projects, caching plugins like WP Rocket or W3 Total Cache that do most of the heavy-lifting if you want to skip the optimization until you become profitable.
You can also find various security extensions for two-factor authentication, file monitoring, or other goodies - as well as integration to CDNs and software firewalls.
Schedule a call and I'll help you plan your strategy, avoid obstacles and grow with time.
This depends on if you want your company to stand still online or live in real time? The benefits of Wordpress are outstanding and in high demand. Even the NY Times is a Wordpress. It makes perfect sense and will set free of any boundaries of traditional building and SEO.
SEO is about onsite content and will bring in the best organic search results for your product or brand if done right from the start. All I build is Wordpress for my Clients and Myself let me know if you need more help.
Wordpress. com Vs Wordpress. org
http://www.bloggersschool.com/2009/01/05/using-blogger-vs-wordpresscom-vs-wordpressorg/
Best Wishes
John Ciampa,
Bloggers School
For a news website, WordPress, Drupal or SquareSpace would be the best option. Unless you have a very large budget, building a custom site with a custom CMS doesn't make much sense.
WordPress, hands down. Development will be quicker and cheaper than rolling your own. There are plenty of tutorials to show you how to do things so you would not be 100% reliant on your dev(s).
I be wary of Cloudflare as it does not always help - you should test and see if it's a benefit based on your host and what plugins you are using.
Host-wise, most of the 'managed WordPress' services are garbage. It would be better to find a reliable and reputable host - though this can be difficult with 99% of hosting reviews being nothing more than a collection of affiliate links arranged by the size of their commissions. WPEngine is the real deal but their costs are based on page views and their $30 plan can easily be $200 for a high traffic site. MediaTemple & GoDaddy's WordPress offerings are garbage.
If you need a more customized size, Drupal can be a good option. It offers much easier customizability out of the box than WordPress. But from the sounds of your needs, WordPress is the way to go.
I think that you're not asking the right question.
You make it sound like building a site using WordPress is something like a standard box you would get in the supermarket, whereas a custom site would be something different completely.
WordPress is a CMS (Content Management System) and websites built with this software are dynamic.
Now you can implement WordPress in many different ways. You can buy a readymade theme and use that for your site or you can "have a custom site built from scratch".
Last year I released a WordPress starter theme that can be used to build a custom site on. It basically stands in the middle of starting completely from scratch and a completely ready made theme as it already gives you a solid back- and front end framework as a basis.
If you were going to make a site without WordPress and without any other CMS, then you would most likely be looking at hand-coded HTML?
The clear advantage of using a CMS (any CMS really, including WordPress) is that it is easy to change or to add on to the content later on. There are many more advantages of using a CMS over a hand coded method, but I think that is outside of the scope of your question.
If you want to talk more about the best solution for your project, I'd be happy to talk with you.
The fact that you are even asking the question points to WordPress for your initial, and possibly ultimate solution, since WordPress was conceived and evolved to serve the purpose of delivering content.
However, don't assume that with WordPress you'll be ready launch from day 1, as some have suggested. If this is a serious business, at the very least, you will need to plan and structure your site's architecture, curate and configure and test plugins and theme/frameworks, design and configure forms for landing pages and newsletter capture, pull in and curate feeds or submission forms for all these articles, seo strategy and automation, establish contributor roles and editorial workflows, widgets, sidebars, conditionals, and customize the backend to simplify and secure all of the above. If you are serious, you may also need to build custom post types, meta boxes for custom fields, and custom templates and search forms to display them; Then there are advertising systems, social media inflows outflows etc... And maybe you'll even decide to build an a mobile app and use WordPress to power the data, users, and backend.
If it's starting to sound like custom development that's because that is exactly what it is. But by the end you will also know what the limits of WordPress are and know enough about your audience and the development of sites that if you do decide to go with something other than WordPress you will be better for it.
If there is one thing I've learned in 7 years of WordPress development it is that every site is different and WordPress is a powerful and complex platform—not necessarily a simple one (to develop in).
Its depend on what you building ...
If you building a blog or an informatics website then you want to go for custom development you can easy my interact with nibbleblog, WordPress, joomla etc CMS.
But if you are creating some specific functionality which is in your ming then you must go for custom development.
About WordPress
>Easy to install
>Open source -no cost
>user interface and admin good
>front end responce depend on your theme and plug ins
> little bit risky, people know source code easy to hack
About customs development
>time taking for development
>well secured
>apply any custom fictionality
>seo friendly as per development
>desired interaction and front end.
In fact, there exists just one case where using WordPress is deemed a good business decision: if it meets the software requirement specification of a given web project.
Generally speaking, WordPress is usually the no.1 choice if the project falls under the category of content-based portals such as blogs/newspapers.
When making a decision on the use of WordPress, security vulnerabilities of the WordPress core and plugin should be considered. At the same time, most of the themes and plug-ins as well as the core of WordPress are not fully compatible with PHP 7. Moving WordPress website from PHP 5 to PHP 7 can as such break the website.
There are limits of customization that come with any system built with WordPress CMS. If the WordPress-based project grows (more registered users, more operations per second, etc.), at some point there is no choice but to re-create it with a framework (such as Laravel) or (if it is possible) to migrate the website to the Laravel framework.
More details are here: https://belitsoft.com/laravel-development-services/cms-or-framework-wordpress-or-laravel
If you want to talk more about the best solution for your project, I'd be happy to talk with you.
TLDR; WordPress.
If you use a VPS or cloud hosting, with OpenLiteSpeed and Oxygen Builder, you can create a custom website that loads very very quickly, has great SEO (though you can use RankMath).
A lot of people think wordpress is slow or bad becuase they often see it on shared hosting bogged down with bloated plugins. This doesn't have to be the case. I have made and seen sites load very fast, with photos etc.
You can also use Custom Fields and Custom Post Types to fully customise your pages, categories and apperance as well as improve backend management.
I use a Lindode VPS, and they have a one-click WP install (though I don't use that), I use CyberPanel (free cPanel) and OLS as mentioned. There is also Closte which run OLS on google cloud, and many other excellent providers. What you choose ultimitley depends on how many users you expect.
Some of the biggest and busiest websites run on WordPress, for exmaple:
TechCrunch.
The New Yorker.
BBC America.
Bloomberg Professional.
They all rely on CDNs, that will be your best weapon if you have hundreds of thousands of visitors or more.
WordPress can both be set-up quickly and managed and improved in the long run.
The only people not using it are nay-sayer hipsters or big companies who both have the time (and knowledge) to make something custom. If you're a small-medium buinesses, then just use WordPress, at least to start with.
But I will say, Oxygen Builder will make your life much easier and it isn't bloated and won't slow down your page(s), it can achieve "349 millisecond load times" and that's without the OLS cache.
Don't forget to compress images and serve them from a CDN as well, makes a huge difference.
Good luck!
Congratulations on launching Rewire Daily! The decision between using WordPress or building a custom website depends on various factors, and each option has its pros and cons.
WordPress is an excellent choice for its user-friendly interface, extensive theme options, and a plethora of plugins that can enhance functionality. It's particularly beneficial for content-driven websites like news/media platforms, offering a quick setup and ease of content management.
On the other hand, a custom-built website provides greater flexibility and scalability. You have complete control over the design, features, and functionality, ensuring a unique and tailored user experience. This is especially advantageous if you have specific requirements or envision future expansions and unique features.
Considering your goals for Rewire Daily, I recommend exploring the web development services offered by Cleveroad (https://www.cleveroad.com/web-development-company/). They specialize in creating customized web solutions, and their expertise might be invaluable in crafting a unique website that aligns perfectly with your vision for Rewire Daily.
Take some time to assess your specific needs, budget, and long-term goals. If you lean towards a more tailored solution, reaching out to Cleveroad could be a beneficial next step.
Best of luck with the launch of Rewire Daily!
It's best you you build a custom website
Hi there,
Firstly congrats on the new page. I would suggest to make it with WordPress because the CMS is very useful. But if you have any WordPress Developer i would suggest to make a custom theme so you're site would look more professional and more dynamic. The key of the WordPress is that the CMS lets you do things more easy than the other platforms. So my answer is YES you should do it with WordPress.
Kind regards,
Dijar Hashani
Full Stack Developer
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