Don’t re-invent the wheel.
August 26th, 2006 by Han Kern
With literally hundreds of publishing platforms; such as WordPress; available for free on the internet, is there really a need for a custom made website? I don’t think so. There are a few exceptions to that of course.
For example, if you are a web designer, you would want a custom made website to showcase your design skills and expertise. Or if you are a large corporation, a custom made website can be more tailored to your customers’ as well as your own special needs.
Apart from these few exceptions however, almost anybody else is better off building a website through free publishing platforms. Why re-invent the wheel when it is already available for you?
Some benefits of using an open source publishing platform such as WordPress:
- The large community behind it
- This benefits you in many ways. For one thing, it means that bugs are quickly discovered and fixes for them quickly released.
- It also means that there are tons of support documents out there as well as people who are able to provide you with free support.
- Having a large community and user-base also leads to creation of many plugins and themes that allow users to customize and personalize their websites even further.
- Easy installation
- Installing WordPress is as simple as getting a suitable host, downloading WordPress, and following the instructions. Once again, not only are there plenty of support documentation, there are also tons of people out there who are willing to help beginners.
- Easy management
- Most publishing platforms have administrative panels where the creators can control anything and everything for their website. There’s no need to make changes to many different files; just change them in the administrative panels.
- You can do everything from making posts or adding pages to changing the layout or modifying a theme.
- Whole lot of other reasons!
- There are a whole lot of other benefits such as the ability to have multiple authors with different roles (some can post, some can’t, etc).
- Spam protection.
- And even password-protected posts!
Some people have commented that you lose a sense of class when you use publishing platforms versus when you custom make a website. They say that publishing platform websites look similar; plain, dull, boring.
That may have been true before, but with thousands of themes available, the days of similar looking publishing platform websites are fast being replaced with uniquely designed ones.
So what are you waiting for? Now that these publishing platforms make website creation so easy, you no longer have the excuse of “but I don’t know computer stuff”.
Get up and make a website!
