6 Considerations When Adopting WordPress

WordPress developers love WordPress! But even though WordPress holds the prime market position in the CMS market it's not our go to CMS for every job. Here's 6 key points to consider when making a decision on whether to use WordPress or a more low level CMS like Umbraco:

• WordPress CMS's are cheaper to build as there is a large number of templates to choose from. If you don't want custom graphic design, you will have more choice from WordPress designs.
• If you are doing a graphic design from scratch, Umbraco's templating system is easier than WordPress, but not by a lot.
• WordPress has more plugins. Plugins are modules on top of the basic CMS such as form modules, blog modules, ECommerce, SEO, caching...on the list goes.
• However WordPress sites are harder to modify. If you know there will be a lot of modifications and the plugins you need are a stop gap, I'd be questioning the decision to use WordPress.
• Umbraco is a lower level CMS designed to build plugins from scratch quickly. If you have complex custom business logic throughout your website you will need custom plugins and Umbraco is a great choice.
• The language used in Umbraco, c#, is better suited to custom programming and creates code bases that are less likely to have run time crashes.

In summary, choose WordPress when you are certain your website is unlikely to have complex custom extensions. For instance, if you are a small professional services business you are unlikely to ever need a complex website. On the other hand, if you are a corporate company, or provide E-Commerce integration to existing back end systems, you will need the power to perform deep customisations with a tool like Umbraco.