Comparing WordPress to a web host’s proprietary site building method.

RVspeakers.netThe owner of a local spa speaker company hired me to build a few sites with his hosting company’s website builder software. I had never used that particular sitebuilder software before, but after a little trial and error, I figured it out. It reminded me a bit of when I used to use the Dreamweaver visual interface, though with the hosting company’s site building application you don’t get to see much of the code behind the design and it’s obviously designed for people who are not web designers. The client liked using that software because he already knew how to use it and found it easy to make edits to the existing sites. I explained to him that doing multiple websites in the sitebuilder can get more expensive than necessary because they charge for things like mobile compatibility and they charge for each website rather than there being just one hosting charge for multiple WordPress websites, like I am used to. The site builder site is not very expandable either, there is a limit to what the host’s application can do, but for simple websites it’s fine and creating the design was easy, it has very simple drag and drop functionality.

As an experiment and to introduce the client to WordPress, I created one of his websites in WordPress with a custom Genesis responsive theme to match the sites that I’d designed for him in the sitebuilder application. It was more complicated and time consuming to create the custom theme from scratch in WordPress and it was only possible to create a matched custom theme because I’m a professional WordPress designer, but now that it’s done, the client will be able to make edits easier than in the sitebuilder application and WordPress is much much more expandable, versatile and more cost efficient to host multiple sites. Doing a custom theme in WordPress can get expensive but there are now so many great themes available that one only needs a custom theme if they want something totally unique or if they have something in mind that is not already available to them. Most existing themes can be customized if necessary to achieve your final design goals. You can do so many more things with a WordPress site if you want to, where as the hosting company’s website builder sites are very limited as far as expandability goes. SEO-wise they seemed to be performing about equally.

After testing the WordPress site, the client asked to convert more websites to WordPress.