Anybody Use Wordpress?

Just a general question for ATS'ers....

Do any of you Web Design Guru's use Wordpress for any of your clients or personal projects, or do you make your own custom themes?

Me personally, I started with DreamWeaver a long time ago and CSS, XHTML & PHP is like child's play to me, so 3 or 4 year's ago started testing out different platforms such as Drupal & Joomla, that was until I really got into full flight with Wordpress.

From a Business stand-point I regularly advise all my clients to make the switch from their basic websites to Wordpress and none of my tech savy customers have ever had any bad comments using this software to power their online presence.

The amount of editing i've had to do due to clients requirements to the Core files and within the database in the past was astonishing, however surprisingly simple when compared to other software. As a developer though, i've only custom designed a handful of themes, in the past i've always found a unique design and modded the CSS to my customers specifications which always has great results.

How much do you guys typically charge for a general 10-15 pages Wordpress website? I've been doing a lot on the cheap for around £600, but have realised that it's about time I started upping the price perhaps...

I look forward to hearing your replies.

I would definitely like to know these answers, too. I am an old-school designer from print, transitioned to digital, and hand-code html/css and am having a hard time making the transition to CMS platforms. I am sure it is easy but I need to take a refresher course or something to get my inertia going. I also want to build my own templates, as most Joomla/WP themes don't have that custom look.

Originally posted by AwakeinNM
I would definitely like to know these answers, too. I am an old-school designer from print, transitioned to digital, and hand-code html/css and am having a hard time making the transition to CMS platforms. I am sure it is easy but I need to take a refresher course or something to get my inertia going. I also want to build my own templates, as most Joomla/WP themes don't have that custom look.

For me, I still need to use DreamWeaver and hand-code certain websites or files because I have clients who are still happy with their static designs and it is my responsibility to perform the updates. However from a selling and practical point of view, DreamWeaver is fast becoming something out of the arc, and within the next 5-10 years we'll hardly see any new websites on the net built using this type of software.

CMS is the future. Personally, I don't see why I should ever go back to using DreamWeaver when I have everything and more at my fingertips via Wordpress.

It's definitely worth investing some time and/or money into using Open Source Software. It's the best thing I ever did. All my clients can have a database and admin facility which can be accessed from any remote computer in the world....something DreamWeaver freezes in fear over the thought of!

And although most Wordpress/Drupal/Joomal themes come fully-packed with tons of content. They can be stripped back if you need to build more regular looking website. An example been one of my latest customers, an Estate Agent who wants his new Wordpress site to look as similar as possible to his current DreamWeaver site.

Here's what I have so far...

hullblinds.co.uk...

If it was down to me, i'd go to town on the design, but the customer know's exactly what he wants so i'm happy to bring it to life.

reply to post by Just Chris


Looks good so far, as far as I can recommend you should learn php and mysql. It is terribly miserable reading but it is extremely helpful with your background. Themes are easy to find and manipulate. As long as you have a good photo manipulation software like photoshop/gimp and something to modify flash files like dreamweaver you are good. Learn the code though, they are going to break something and it will make it easier for you to fix it because they have added some incompatible plugin because they thought it was a good idea. If you need any help send me a message I will see what I can do.

Originally posted by Just Chris

For me, I still need to use DreamWeaver and hand-code certain websites or files because I have clients who are still happy with their static designs and it is my responsibility to perform the updates. However from a selling and practical point of view, DreamWeaver is fast becoming something out of the arc, and within the next 5-10 years we'll hardly see any new websites on the net built using this type of software.

CMS is the future. Personally, I don't see why I should ever go back to using DreamWeaver when I have everything and more at my fingertips via Wordpress.

From what I understand, many people making CMS templates from scratch are using DreamWeaver to do them. I don't see DW going away anytime soon. I think the real value as a designer lies in your ability to design CMS templates/sites from scratch, at least in the near term.

CMS sites are like anything else: Useful for some applications, not for others. They can get really slow if you have too many modules and add-ons going. Also from a visual design perspective, they can be quite limiting.

Yup.

www.thru-hole.com...

It is like the change from the old OS where you had command lines to windows.

Easy, but less powerful.

I have pretty much forgotten how to program HTML..

K

I love Wordpress and have used it to build all of my latest websites.

For those of you who are not familiar with it, It's template based (Wordpress calls them themes). They offer an instructional and links to free software for putting a surrogate server and database on your computer to host the site while you are constructing it. Even easier, some hosting companies like Domainsatcost have it loaded and ready for you to go so all you do is choose a template, add your content and configure it to look the way you want. Wordpress will host for free this way as well but using someone like Domainsatcost allows you to use your own domain name instead of wordpress/whatever.com. Most hosting sites at least have all the support components for running a Wordpress theme.

If you are going to try it I recommend you start with the Atahualpa theme. It is very intuitive yet extremely flexible. It is one of the most popular themes so there is a very good support community for it.

Additionally Wordpress offers tons of free plugins for all of the usual advanced website functions like customer order forms, event calendars, etc.

Yea WP rocks for the "easy" CMS alternative. It works good for businesses or individuals that usually want to update things on their own. Very flexible. Very easy to make look unique.

Check out some WIP and end results.

luxuriousbackyards.com...
lakewaywebdesign.com...


You need to get comfortable just using something like notepad++, DW is usually overkill for a lot of things. I like to mockup in photoshop for a client then code it into WP.

My page on WP sums it up pretty well..

lakewaywebdesign.com...

If you can buy a month of lynda, then start with wordpress for designers it will be a great help. I would recommend moving away from DW (or not starting with it) when you can for most design work. I see it often that Dreamweaver turns out to be a bigger crutch and/or limiter then you want.

M2C

reply to post by Just Chris


My feedback on the site, just my opinion, follows:

- Grab a Logo, 99 designs is usually not bad.
- Menu might be a good call, under the header region.
- get a good favicon
- tag clouds, tweets, latest news is a bit old-school
- get rid of the flash header
- You dont have analytics installed, Google analytics is the bomb for knowing what is going on with your site
- Also google webmaster tools
- You have a text heavy site, pictures with good alt txt tags is a great SEO idea for every site
- The frontpage blogroll, is osmeone paying you for that? Looks bad
- adding .html extensions is a great call
- define canonical for the site