Making the right web development choice

How involved will you be in your website?

Making the decision to enter the world of online marketing and retail is a big decision that requires budget, time, human resources and most importantly; follow through. Continued maintenance and updates to your online platform will be necessary in order for it to be recognised by your customers and by Google as a worthwhile place to be. This leads us to the question of what system you will use to do this. Will you outsource the work to your web development team or will you train staff to include the daily task of website maintenance to their workload, be it posting new books to your e-commerce site, or updating your blog with your recommended reads for the season.
This brings us to the consideration of a content management system (CMS). A CMS is a multi-user software platform that allows creation, editing and deletion of content all from a central interface. CMSs are most often used to run websites containing blogs, news, and e-commerce online shops. Many corporate, marketing, publishing and bookselling websites use CMSs. CMSs typically aim to avoid the need for hand coding which allows for easy operation by anyone with access to a computer and a small amount of savvy.
There are many different CMS platforms available on the web and the digital agency you work with will be able to guide you in terms of their preferred platform. At our agency, we use WordPress, which is by far the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day (even though they might not even know it). It is estimated to have a 61% market share of all CMS platforms and powers an incredible 23% of all websites on the internet. Even though conceptualisation and coding began back in 2001, WordPress is still a very actively developed open-source software project and with the recent release of version 4.0 it is even more mature, stable, secure and feature-rich than ever before.

The functionality that WordPress offers to a team of well-versed developers is where it really comes into its own and probably relates directly to the success of the platform itself. Developing with such a flexible system allows for a greater level of artistry with regards to the organisation of an individual business’ unique content. The key to understanding how WordPress works harks back to its early days as a hobbyist blogging platform: every ‘thing’ in a WordPress system is a post. The use of WordPress’ custom post types to indicate separate data entities within the content of the site is the real ‘killer app’. Custom taxonomies (previously known as post categories), whether hierarchical or flat allow for effective grouping of the different content and post attributes allow for the storage of random yet important meta data for each post.

The now fully responsive WordPress back-end is a remarkably useful tool for project managers, copy-writers and designers and offers a collaborative platform on which teams with different skill sets can operate. Your web development team should understand how your organisation operates and the data entities it requires to function properly. They will then model the relationships between these entities, their categorisations and any meta information required for each atomic entity using the WordPress admin interface. In a sense development starts from the back-end (data perspective) and then works forward to the public facing look and feel. It is this back-to-front (logic first) approach that we believe delivers the correctly customised WordPress platform for any individual or company to take their idea, what ever it may be, forward into the digital world.

So, why should you choose WordPress as the platform for your next CMS? Apart from it’s massive adoption by the internet community, great documentation and a plethora of plugins and off-the-shelf themes, the following is a non-exhaustive list of some of the reasons we at Country love WordPress:

1. Ease of use
Even the most tech-challenged individuals will find it easy to work with the WordPress administrative interface. Massive updates to your site or just simple additions can be achieved with a few clicks. WordPress’ intuitive interface and the ability to easily assign user permissions make delegation and segregation of the workload of an active website quite simple. A cleverly crafted theme can further simplify matters by componentizing site content into smaller, more manageable units.

2. Custom theming
Custom themes for WordPress have been around since version 1.5 (circa 2005), so it is a well-established feature of this platform. Making your own theme is not child’s play, nor is it ‘next level’ difficult. Start with your design concept and a vanilla theme like Twentyfourteen (shipped with the default WordPress install), mix in your responsive framework of choice (Bootstrap is our favourite), throw in your trusty Javascript framework (jQuery) and add some Javascript plugins to taste. Voila! A slick new custom theme is born. If all this seems too much for you, remember that experts can craft you a custom theme to suit your exact design and functionality requirements. But be warned, purchasing an off-the-shelf custom theme from a site like ThemeForest may initially seem attractive from a price and simplicity perspective, however these themes are generally over-engineered (to suit everyone’s requirements) and are generally not a good fit for most businesses.

3. Custom post types
As mentioned previously, WordPress boils down to posts. As of WordPress version 3, developers can now specify their own custom post types. The introduction of custom post types made WordPress so flexible it became obvious that it had graduated from a hobbyist blogging tool into a full-blown CMS platform. Custom posts allow for the categorization and partitioning of logical business information into distinct, searchable chunks, which can be presented to the end-user in a variety of ways depending on the template in use. Custom posts can also be assigned a default set of meta attributes (such as price, barcode, ISBN, GPS coordinates etc.) in order to further enhance the usefulness of this feature. Custom posts are accessible as a top-level element (like posts or pages) in the WordPress admin interface.

4. Yoast SEO
There is little point in creating a beautiful new CMS-backed site if nobody ever finds it. Yoast’s SEO plugin for WordPress makes managing your WordPress site’s SEO a breeze. Yoast SEO adds fields to the post page in the WordPress admin area that guide even the most novice SEO copywriter through the pitfalls of creating search-friendly content. Easy installation coupled with RDFa breadcrumbs, rich snippets, robots.txt generation, XML sitemap generation and site wide defaults make Yoast SEO an absolute must for each and every WordPress site created today. Oh, and it’s free!

5. Woocommerce
Woocommerce, an eCommerce plugin for WordPress, comes standard with everything you would normally require to get a basic eCommerce website running. It’s installation and integration into WordPress is seamless and for most startup sites it is initially a perfect fit. Functionality includes (but is by no means limited to):
• Orders (order status, notes, order history)
• Coupons (free, limited, per product, per user)
• Shipping (free, flat rate)
• Inventory management (products variations, pricing, categories, stock)
• Reporting (top sellers by product / category / date, stock, customer)
• Tax setup (standard, zero rated, reduced rate)
• Payments (EFT, COD, credit card, Paypal)

In addition to the above free features, WooCommerce offers hundreds of paid for extensions and themes to make your site function just the way you want it to, including support for most of the major payment gateways and logistics suppliers. All of the above considered, WordPress and WooCommerce out-of-the-box is certainly one of the most mature and feature-rich free eCommerce solutions available today.

Matthew Faircliff, is a true African IT entrepreneur. He worked for iafrica.com, EasyPay and Rocketseed before setting up Databias, a hosting company that is the foundation of Country Digital. He is proficient in databases, Perl, Python, PHP, C# and Windows / Unix system administration. He also speaks some Afrikaans.