IT Architecture: WordPress

What I like about WordPress

Ease of use, quick development, built in SEO, and plugin availability are just several reasons to like WordPress. For a development project, I designed a website called Story64. It’s a website for writers to submit stories exactly 64 words long. As an avid writer, I chose something of personal interest. I used a free theme and only had to do minimal coding. WordPress is so widely used, finding code snippets for almost anything is just a Google away.

What I don’t like about WordPress

Constant Updates. WordPress websites have to be continuously updated. I designed a Flash website IcyGrail.com back in 2010 and it still l runs great (check it out if you got moment). Story64, if left untouched, would likely break within a year’s time.

While updates are a pain, the biggest negative to WordPress sites are their load times. Story64 takes too long to load a page. This was an issue for me. After doing some research, I found most WordPress sites use CDN’s (Content Delivery Networks). CDN’s act as a middle-man between your host and the user. CDN’s cache all of the pages of your website, and when a user visits a page from your site, the CDN will load the page for you. They provide better performance and also protect against host downtime. The negatives. All CDN’s cost dollars, and I’m all about the zero-cost options. Another issue is updates. The CDN can take some time to re-cache your site, causing a potential delay in delivery of the most current content. There are ways around this, but sometimes further customization is needed.

All and all, WordPress still eclipses the development time of building a site from scratch, and I highly recommend getting familiar with it or one of its comparables.