What’s Up With WordPress?

ExpressionEngine

Knowing that, we decided to look into different content management system companies. Ellis Lab’s ExpressionEngine was clean and customizable. And it had a whole development team maintaining it. That meant we could focus on helping our clients with their marketing, instead of keeping up with the backend software.Those factors led us to choose ExpressionEngine as our preferred CMS.

WordPress

During our initial research, I wasn’t particularly impressed with WordPress. It was first created as a blogging tool, but people began to use it as a makeshift content management system. Over the years, I heard quite a few horror stories about security issues.

But recently, I decided to give WordPress another look. According to Forbes, more than 25% of all websites are managed through WordPress. I even know someone who owns a CMS company who uses WordPress for his website! I have to admit – my interest was piqued.

What I found was that WordPress has changed a lot in the past few years. It’s definitely risen to Papercut’s standards. The new interface is clean and allows you to view the web page you’re working on and edit directly on the page. There are a lot of quality plugins for free, and it’s easy to make updates when new versions are released. Most importantly, if you take the right steps, you can make it just as secure as any other CMS.

Page Builders

At the moment, we’re using Beaver Builder, a drag and drop page builder tool, to create a client’s WordPress site that will launch next month. We’ve been able to create templates and sections that our client can use to customize pages in a variety of ways. Within those sections there are a lot of different functionalities. You can drop in photos, columns, a text editor – whatever you need! To me, page building tools like this show a lot of promise and open up opportunities for design efficiencies.

All this to say, WordPress is a new tool in our arsenal. For some projects, it may be the best solution. For others, we might stick with ExpressionEngine or even use Craft. Whatever fits best with our client’s needs is the direction we’re headed.