Building a Website – Custom Build or CMS – You Decide

It seems like going into 2017, every man, woman and child has a website. From small, bedroom based operations, through to personal blogs right through to like corporate organisations – everyone has a website. The options for creating your website are ever-changing too. More and more options are coming on the market and all of them are making it easier than ever to get up and running with your own web presence.

Creating a Website – Custom/CMS

In this article we’re going to look at some of the ways you can create your own website and the tools available to do so. We’ll also address some of the fundamental questions you need to ask yourself should you be making the leap and getting started with your own site.

The CMS

The CMS or content management is the go to application from most webmasters. The most popular of which would have to be WordPress. What once was a simple platform to run a personal blog has transformed into a fully blown content management system in its own right.

Due to the popularity of WordPress both in terms of users and developers, you can pretty much get a website to look exactly as you like and perform exactly as you like for less than £50. The options are endless and in terms of the content management itself you’ll find that you’ll be able to do anything from basic page/post creation to complex forms and data updates.

Custom Build

The custom build avoids using an off the shelf CMS entirely. You’d build the website yourself using a database such as MySQL. A back end processor such as PHP and a front end with HTML/jQuery. Everything written from scratch.

Developers especially prefer doing this as it means they can control every aspect of their build rather than trying to shoehorn it into an off the shelf solution such as WordPress. However, this option is obviously not available to those unable to “code” or “design” and hiring someone to do the above is likely to come at a premium.

To Hire or Not to Hire

This is the age old debate. Do you hire someone to do everything you need? Do you learn how to code and do something yourself or do you simply use a third party CMS or online website builder in order to create your virtual masterpiece.

All of the above solutions have their pros and cons and I guess it would primarily depend on time and budget. If you have the time, by all means give it a go yourself but if you don’t you’re going to need to hire a professional. The project will no doubt determine what sort of budget you have available but make sure if you are hiring someone that you at least project manage the build as costs can quickly spiral out of control.

Current Trends

There isn’t one stand out trend at the moment. There seems to be pockets of build types. You’ll have people who swear by online website builders like Wix. You’ll get those who will build anything and everything with WordPress and an off the shelf theme and you’ll get the developers who like to reinvent the wheel and will happily build everything with a custom script, even if it has been done before.

Each of these types also has its favorites. WordPress for CMS, Wix/Moonfruit for website builders and in terms of custom builds a PHP based on a framework such as Laravel solution with a Bootstrap or Angular JS front end is the choice of many. But as we all know, trends change over time and what is current today may not be tomorrow.

Online Website Builders

These are perhaps gaining more prominence than they should. I’m not a fan of building websites with drag and drop having wasting year on year learning the likes of HTML but I can understand why they have their place. If you’re inexperienced they can be a fantastic go to solution and will do the job if all you’re looking for is something basic. They are also extremely cheap in comparison to hiring a developer and in some cases even cheaper than buying a WordPress theme!

After Thoughts

So as you can see, there are lots of options available for your site building needs. Whether you want to use a common CMS, build a custom site, use an online website builder or hire a professional to do any of the above for you – there are options.

Trends change with time, new applications are coming on the market. New techniques are forged, frameworks released and ways of doing things changing often for the better. But there is one common theme. Everything is designed to make things easier for the end user. The easier you make getting a web presence, the more web presences there will be. 🙂