Freelance Software Developer

Preamble

Wordpress is a great Content Management System (CMS). It's a free, open-source and PHP based application backed up by a MySQL database.

If you have a lightweight hosting package limiting you to a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack then it is often the best, sometimes only, option for business websites.

Overview

A hardware company came to me with a request for a basic brochure style website to showcase their products. They had an existing infrastructure they wanted to keep but felt a website refresh was long overdue.

Available Options

The hosting infrastructure was predetermined by the client's requirement for a website to run on a traditional LAMP stack.

The client had some technical experience with HTML and CSS and had been maintaining their own static website for some years, making delivering a plain static website an entirely feasible proposition. So, the big decision was whether to building a static website or a theme for a popular CMS like Wordpress or Drupal.

The Solution

A prototype website was used to show the client how the website would look and feel and demonstrate how it could be updated by code, followed by an explanation of the benefits of a CMS and a demonstration of WordPress and Jekyl; It became clear, fairly quickly, that WordPress was a hit. It's simplicity, support for themes and lower ongoing maintenance costs proving too much to resist.

The prototype was upgraded to a full WordPress theme, staged and tested on Windows Azure until the client was satisfied, after which is was deployed to their hosting environment.

Conclusions

The website has performed well over the years and is still running today. The customer's team adapted quickly to using WordPress and learnt to create and upload new content quickly.

The WordPress plugin ecosystem also means they've been able to adapt and add new features, often without developer support, such as the ability to tweak SEO settings and take regular backups.