Which website platform to choose?

First question to ask yourself is – “What are your plans when the website is finished?” If you plan on updating your website frequently you should probably go with a CMS (Content Management System). By having a back end access you will be able to update and change information on your website frequently, easily, and with no programming skills. Website content can be updated on a custom coded website of course, but in that case information is updated by a more experienced web programmer who updates website’s content by using a code editor. The main reason CMS websites were developed in the first place is to help less experienced users to easily change and update information on their website. There are so many tutorials on the web about how to manage a WordPress or Joomla website, or Shopify online store, or any other content management system. Some of our clients were aimed toward learning WordPress and Joomla skills and we were happy to help them by providing video tutorials and writing help documents containing detailed instructions and screenshots.

However one would say – “Why would I then create a custom coded website since it doesn’t have a back end for updating and management?” The first and the most important advantage of custom coded websites over CMS websites is loading time or speed of opening which is very short i.e. very fast. CMS websites are usually coded robustly and contain hundreds of folders and thousands of files and thus require certain time to load. On contrary, a custom coded website can be developed and optimized to load in a matter of a second. There was a study conducted that says – “If your website takes longer than three seconds to load, you could be losing nearly half of your visitors!” This statement emphasizes the importance of having a well coded website that loads fast!

Also, in our experience we can say that custom coded websites provide higher security because intruders are usually aimed towards Open Source software such as WordPress or Joomla. The code used to develop a custom coded website is not available to them so they cannot understand it and change it.

If you have something for sale, the perfect solution would be the WooCommerce Online Store. WooCommerce is comprehensive and very easy to use. Most options are self-explanatory so that you, as a potential store manager, can understand all the options within the backend dashboard and successfully manage your store. WooCommerce is a classic example of an intuitive and simple backend graphical environment. There is also the possibility of integrating your online store with eng. Payment Gateways like Stripe and PayPal.