One of the first things that most of our clients will be interested to hear is that Wordpress is free. You don’t have to pay a licence fee to use it – which, frankly, is brilliant. You’ll still need to think about having a budget for development, design and making sure that it fits your precise needs – but the saving on not having to pay for a bespoke CMS is significant.

Being open source, the coding of Wordpress is entirely editable, which means there are regular system updates and a rich network of developers around the world working on it. There is an ever-increasing number of ‘plug-ins’ available, improving the functionality of the system. It’s an incredibly adaptable platform – it can be very simple or very complicated, depending on your requirements.

Like most CMS, it’s made to be user-friendly for non-techie people – the back end of the system might take a bit of time to learn, but because so many people are using it, there are answers to any question you might have online. Also, there are large groups of user contributing to the Beta Testing system, meaning that bugs get ironed out quickly.

Unlike many systems, Wordpress is portable. You aren’t tied to a particular hosting system or the one developer who built your website – any developer can take over your site, meaning that you don’t get stuck with a supplier who isn’t providing the best service for you. There are lots of specialist hosting solutions that are easy to set up – so again, you don’t get tied into something that might not work for you in a few months time.

In addition to all this, Wordpress is a search engine friendly system, which is great news for SEO and getting your website ranking on the search terms that are relevant to you.

While we love Wordpress for all of the reasons listed above, there are few things that it’s really good to be aware of before you choose Wordpress for your website.

Because Wordpress is so user friendly, you can create a new site and have it up and running within just a few hours. However, without any coding, the site will only work in a very simple way. To make a more complex site, one that works the way you want it to, will require expert development knowledge. If it requires a lot of work to meet your requirements, it can be cheaper to get a custom system built rather than altering an existing platform – so talking to a developer before you get started is important.

If a developer adapts the Wordpress CMS for your site, they may have to make changes to the core Wordpress coding. It’s important to know that this might mean additional costs down the line if you upgrade your version of Wordpress, because the changes will have to be made and tested again.

The themes on Wordpress are great – but as designers, we can’t express enough how important it is that your website represents your brand. Publicly available themes are likely to be used by other free sites, which could hugely devalue your site if noticed. Your site should have a dedicated theme designed and coded by a professional.

In terms of hosting, you should be aware that Wordpress requires a database to run, so in some cases you may need to upgrade your hosting package.

The final thing to keep in mind, is that unlike bespoke systems, the way the back-end CMS works is fixed in some ways. This means that if you require huge changes to the back-end, it may not be possible for these to work in the most logical ways.

Our main piece of advice is to talk it over with a developer before making your decision. Wordpress is a great platform and may well be perfect for your needs but sometimes we’ll nudge our clients away from Wordpress and towards paying for a content management system that will better support their business processes.

Every web project needs planning and foresight – so before you settle on one system or another, have a chat with us about the best way forward.