Category: Uncategorized

With online site building tools like Squarespace & Wix getting popular and easier to use, small businesses are choosing to use these DIY solutions more & more. Unfortunately, it also makes the cost of a custom website seem really expensive. Don’t get me wrong. Paying $216 pear year to build & host a pretty decent website on Squarespace is a smaller pill to swallow, but it’s hurting those of us that build sites for a living & muddying the waters of what a website can do.

Services like Squarespace & WIX is a good idea for blog type sites & those needing something very cookie cutter. However, as mentioned in a previous post, once your needs exceed the confines of these DIY solutions, you find out you need a custom site. But just because you own a point-and-shoot camera, doesn’t make you a photographer. If you don’t know what you’re doing, your site will suffer.

A custom website can range from $500 – $20,000 (depending on the clients’ needs) and can take anywhere from from a few weeks to a few months. However, I’m not one to push a client into spending $10,000 on a custom website if these DIY solutions are a better fit. However, when you pay a professional or company to build your site, you’re not just paying for the site, you’re paying for their knowledge & experience.

Knowing the clients’ needs, is paramount. If you’re selling stuff, e-commerce solutions like Squarespace or Shopify is a better choice because there are a lot of things involved in an e-commerce platform (taxes, coupons, discounts, etc.).

Many a time, I’ve come into a project where the previous “developer” downloaded a free or paid theme and used plugins to tweak the site to get the preferred output. The problem with that is how WordPress loads. 

When WordPress loads, it loads all the functions in the code, loads the WordPress functionality, loads plugins, then loads themes. When you have too many active plugins, you can overload the server the site is hosted on & find out how much your hosting is really worth. For the most part, most hosts will not put many resources to WordPress hosting. Thus, you also find out how well your the theme & plugins are wrote. Unfortunately, the worst time you want to find out your WordPress themes & plugins are poorly written, is when your site so popular it’s pushing the resources of the server.

Here’s the thing. You save a lot of time, effort & frustration if you have an experienced WordPress developer to write the theme you way you want it. For example, the site mentioned earlier, among about 40 plugins, had used a plugin to generate a page of posts based on certain category. The issue I have with this, is that this kind of functionality, is built-in functionality. You don’t need a plugin to do this.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not anti-plugins. In fact, there are a few plugins, I recommend. One of them is the “Force Regenerate Thumbnails“. This is a plugin that doesn’t load as part of the site output, but is a tool that is used when needed.

The point of all this is to use plugins sparingly. If you want to change how a theme outputs your content, ask an experienced WordPress developer to do it.

Welcome to The WordPress Whisperer.

With over twenty years developing websites and ten years of building WordPress sites, I figured it was time to share my thoughts and tips about building WordPress websites. I’ll be posting tips & tricks, as well as opinions and relaying WordPress announcements

For example, WordPress 5.0 came out the day this blog was put up. The primary change in the new version is the new editor (formally codenamed “Gutenberg”). Personally, while I am glad to see that WordPress has more functionality layout wise, I fear for some content creators this will still be too complicated. 

With most custom WordPress projects I work on, I incorporate the “Classic” editor into more direct interfaces to make it as easy as possible to enter in content.