F53-033: Which Website Platform Should I Use?

Show Summary: I'm sticking with the website and technology theme for today's show. It's about what website platform or technology should I use for my site? More specifically, I'll discuss the process by which I assess and I hope you will asses and figure out which platforms are right for you. Assuming you have a service-based business and an existing website, the first thing as you go through this is to ask yourself this very first question: Where are you at with your website now? Specifically, here are the questions you need to answer: Where does your brand sit? What is the functionality of your site? Does it talk to your customer? How does that compare to your competition? How much traffic are you getting? Where is that traffic coming from? You need to be acutely aware of what's happening on your website and what your customers see your website as relative to your competition. What's the reason for your change? If you have a website already, is it not serving a purpose? Is it old technology that you can't update? Is it brand new? Do you want a new design? Are you looking to track a new audience? Maybe it's isn't even one that you're aware of and this is pretty common. What are the specific goals of your website? I can't express to you how important this is. You'd be shocked to understand or see the people who just want something because they want something and there needs to be a very specific goal to it. And the reason is that goal dictates and drives the decisions downstream. What do you want people to do on your website? How do you want to serve them? Do you just want to give them information? Functionality or only content in certain types of forums? Does your value proposition get reflected in your website? Do they see the value of your company? Do they see the value of the services you provide to them? From your goals, identify the core functionality of your site. What pieces in how you want your customers to interact with you will affect what type of website platform you use? Two main routes you can take: Existing CMS or Content Management System - ex. WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, SharePoint Custom Application - custom-written How do I decide if I want to use an existing platform versus custom? Let’s use WordPress as an example here. Using an existing modular plug-in Do you need something so custom that there already is an existing modular plug-in that you can use and modify to meet your business? A modular plug-in is a piece of code applied to a WordPress site that serves a very specific function (ex. eCommerce, membership, contact us form page, chat) Is there not already something out there that you can use and leverage that meets your needs? Customizing off-the-shelf products Take a modular plug-in and then customize it to fit your need. But this can be risky when they update the core plug-in and it can affect the functionality of what you have. Develop everything custom Start from scratch and go create and write your own. In my opinion, you only go custom if you can afford these things such as the development staff forever. It sounds scary but that's how it is. If you have custom core components of your website, you will need someone to take care of that for you forever. It means you have to have resources available to you that can handle it. You have to make sure you can afford staff forever. Will the functionality of your site give you a defined competitive advantage? This is the linchpin of whether you do something custom whether it's the entire website or a custom module inside of a WordPress site. Figure out if this is something that's really custom for you that you would get immense value out of. Understand that doing custom takes longer time to develop. Basically, there may be issues that could come along such as staff, support, bugs, expertise, training, administration, and other stuff that need to be accounted for. Hence, you need to have people to support it forever. You have to understand this is a commitment. Using WordPress WordPress is a really powerful tool. A significant number of websites in the world are run on WordPress. The advantages of using WordPress: It's user-friendly and has a massive following. Resources are fairly easy to come by. There's lots of pre-made modules and plug-ins. They're always improving from the standpoints of security posture, functionality, and usability. Things to be careful with on WordPress: Security You can easily get out of control with the functionality which could make you slow down, makes it harder to manage, and be more vulnerable to security risks. Note: Always remember to backup your website. Back up everything. Things to consider when deciding what plug-ins to use: Security Backup Spam prevention Core functionality Page designer *Remember you really have to go back to assessing your goals and needs for functionality. Is what you need so critical and important or is there a plugin that can already handle it? If there is not, then you may have to use a custom modular plug-in. Again, I caution customizing things because they will break once they're updated. Key Takeaways: All this said, my core belief is that unless there's something very core to your business that distinguishes you over your competition significantly or is actually part of your service, use pre-made modules and execute on them. This may require small process changes in your organization but they're much less expensive than the cost of customizing code and managing it. Make sure what you put in is absolutely needed. You have to make sure it fits your need and your business and you're willing to accept the risk of doing so. A WordPress framework with a number of modules can accomplish basically anything. Customizing 10% of your website is way better than customizing the entire thing or building it from scratch. Make sure you follow some form of process to really assess what you need. Define your goal. Define what the functionality needs to be and that will help you decide all of these other decisions beneath and make sure they're in alignment with your overall goal.   Books, People, & Resources: WordPress Joomla Drupal SharePoint F53-010: Dominating The Market - Growing a Global Golf Company – GolfTEC - Joe Assell Eye9design.com - A boutique web design and WordPress agency that just celebrated 10 years in business (an eternity in the web design space). They built hundreds of websites for businesses of all sizes. Finding a web design company is hard. There are lots of options, lots of good ones but lots of bad ones. Let the team at eye9design take care of you. 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