The beauty of WordPress, and one of the reasons that I choose to use it, is that as a developer, I have access to all of the code. Some other CMS’s lock the code off from the developers. This makes it very difficult to change the layout and behaviour of the website. The core files of WordPress are the same as most custom built websites. Could I build a website from scratch instead? Well yes, I definitely could and I used to do it that way. But why would I do it that way now? It would take me much longer and that time translates into costs for my clients. Using WordPress, a lot of the heavy lifting is already done. I just have to modify the code to make any website look and behave the way that my Client wants. And my client then will have a full content management system so that they can update and change things like content and images on their own.

Another reason that I choose WordPress is that it is very popular. 50-60% of websites today, use WordPress. That is huge. Because of that market share, there are many, many plugins built and reviewed regularly for WordPress. If my Client wants to do something complicated with their website, chances are that a plugin has been built for it. Chances are that there are many plugins. So as a developer, I don’t just use the first plugin. I research all of them and WordPress makes this easy. WordPress offers documentation on all of the “approved” plugins and I can see how many websites are successfully running these plugins. I can read reviews on them as well.

First, I will find a plugin that does what the Client is looking for and I will make sure that I can access the files and change the plugin to make it look and behave exactly the way my client wants. Today, developers can achieve very complex things with a website that used to take hundreds of hours, in as little as a few hours.