Web design with WordPress or a dedicated CMS?

What is a dedicated CMS?

CMS is a content management system or the management panel of a website. Many free open-source CMSs have been designed in recent years which have become available to the public. The most popular free CMSs are Joomla, WordPress and Drupal. In dedicated CMSs, the management panel and database architecture are tailored to the needs of your website.

Advantages of using a dedicated CMS

There are definitely many benefits to use a dedicated system. Here, are the most important ones:

High speed and more flexible

Everything is implemented from the beginning by a professional web designer and tailored to your needs that refers to avoiding any unnecessary code or unnecessary table in database, and information will be accessed as quickly as possible. Also, the designer dominance over the main code and inner communications of the codes, helps him to upgrade the program easily and he would be able to add new features to the program.

High security

One of the most important factors in dedicated CMSs is its high security. This security is due to the specificity of the codes and the fact that others don’t know how it’s been coded.

Imagine your website has been coded in a new language that no one in the world knows, in this case, it would be very difficult to spy on such a system.

It is important to note that specificity of CMS is not sufficient for its security; in some cases, dedicated CMSs may even become more vulnerable than free CMSs. The security of the codes directly depends on knowledge and experience of the developers.

Disadvantages of dedicated CMS compared to WordPress

In addition to features such as security and speed, that are considered in a dedicated CMS, there are some other factors that can affect your choice. The most important disadvantages of a dedicated CMS are:

High cost and time consuming

 Imagine going to the shop to buy a suit or to a personal tailor, which one costs more? The same goes for website design. When you use a free content management system, you will not spent a lot of money on design and development of management panels. In designing a website with dedicated CMSs, the time that is required to design will increase and the costs will increase accordingly.

A company may offer the same price for a dedicated CMS as it is with WordPress. In such a case, be aware that the CMS is not dedicated to you but for that company. That means a CMS is implemented by a team of 5 to 10 people and it will be sold to you as a dedicated system, however at the same time, the same system will be sold to other companies in other fields of work. This CMS is practically exclusive to the company that has produced it.

WordPress content management system has reached its current position in 14 years with the efforts of millions of people around the world. It has been able to become the most popular and most widely used system in its field of work. This statistical community shows what value WordPress can add to your web design.

It is estimated that it takes one hundred years to implement a content management system with WordPress features by one person!

Poor or expensive support

When you use an open-source content management system, like WordPress or Joomla, you face a community of millions of website designers around the world that each of them has its own abilities and experiences. But in a dedicated system, there is only one team of designers.

When website design companies are in their peak of work, they delay your requests or charge you a lot of money to make small changes. In both cases, you will experience a difficult situation; the longer this cooperation lasts the more dependent you become on the company and support conditions become more difficult. Conversely, if the core of your website is WordPress and supporting company does not provide adequate services, you can quickly find an alternative company or workforce at a reasonable price.

We can’t say WordPress is better nor does it mean that dedicated CMS is more appropriate; both can be useful depending on your business scale.

In what kind of websites dedicated CMSs are suitable?

 In this section, we review the most popular websites and decide which content management system is suitable for each of them.

Online store design

A good example of using dedicated CMSs is in designing websites for very large online stores. Usually, websites that sell a wide range of products need a dedicated platform for communications between important departments, such as the delivery department, the administrative department and the warehouse.

In this case, it is recommended to create a proper connection between the departments by using special coding and provide suitable conditions for rapid system upgrade. These companies usually prefer to design an online store by an internal team and IT department of the company in order to meet the needs of system as soon as possible.

A successful example of such companies is SOUQ. Conversely, if you are planning to set up a specialized online store to sell products in a specific field and with a limited target community, using WordPress can be a very good choice because the time and cost of setting up the site will be much less compared to the conditions in which you build a team yourself.

After one or two years of activity and gaining accurate knowledge of the market, you can design and implement a dedicated CMS based on your needs. During the design of this system, your site is well available to customers and provides services to them.

Website design for companies

Design website using WordPress for companies or manufactoring groups is the best available choice. These companies usually require complex features in their admin panel and pay more attention to the design of the outer shell. In this case, WordPress meets all their needs and designing a dedicated template allows them to work online at a reasonable price.

Website design for government agencies

government agencies, in addition to providing information on their websites, usually need a central portal to be able to manage human resources and internal communications. For this purpose, they generally go to companies that specialize in designing enterprise portals and ERP systems.

In these organizations, the internal relations of the company can be separated from the site because most of them practically use their sites only to introduce themselves and inform clients. In such cases, designing a corporate website for web-based activities and managing internal relations through an enterprise portal is recommended.

News website design

SEO is generally very important for news websites and all the features of a news website can be implemented on the WordPress platform. Some people think free content management systems, such as WordPress, do not have the ability to host websites with a lot of content and users, which is not true. Using WordPress in the top news websites in the world implies that WordPress is able to host large sites.

Creative websites design

Creative websites generally refer to the websites that are implemented by a startup and they are based on a completely different approach. Usually in these websites we need to implement features and capabilities that are not available in any other website. in this cases, WordPress and dedicated CMSs are in exactly the same situation and both need development and creativity.

Due to the fact that startups generally do not have the required capital to code a dedicated CMS and build a strong team in their first months of activity, they implement an initial version on the WordPress platform and then analyze customer’s feedback. Whenever they feel that the idea has reached the development stage, they decide to re-implement the website based on a dedicated CMS or even add their desired features to the website in WordPress platform.

Share your experience of starting a new business using WordPress or a dedicated CMS. What other factors do you think we should consider making this choice?