Below are some of the projects I have been working on with a brief description of the techniques used and the final results. Some are large projects carried out over a series of months, whilst others are projects completed in an afternoon.
If you have a project in mind, I would love to hear from you to see if we can work together.
2017-05-25
Yep - I've managed to think of 3.. But of course there is one big stinking reason why not to!
One of the advantages of WordPress is that you don't have to be a computer scientist to set up a website – 2 or 3 clicks are enough, and in an afternoon you have your website working based on a paid or free template.
If your page is going to be a source of information in continuous evolution, that you need to update two or three times a week, reorganizing the menus - changing the photos, writing new sections continuously - then WordPress is ideal. With a few hours of study inside the control panel, you can create new content using an intuitive text editor.
Creating the new menus can be a bit more of a hassle, but it's not impossible either – and once you get the hang of it, you can update your webpage several times a day if you want to.
WordPress releases new versions every time it detects a vulnerability and/or improves its platform. As almost 45% of web pages use it, there is a lot of interest in attacking this platform as the hackers can take down a lot of sites with their malicious code.
The good thing is that WordPress stays up to date – and offers you a new version almost every time you go into the control panel. Don't forget to check whether all of your plugins still work when you do update!
A big drawback of installing and managing a WordPress website yourself is that it is not configured for optimal operation: It comes with many lines of code that you may never use, making multiple calls to a database to retrieve that may not change from one month to the next.
This results in a bad experience for the website visitor – they may not even stick around to see your fantastic page because it's taking so long to load.
If we analyze a typical web page: Top photo banner, company logo, a few lines of text – basically identical, we see several alarming things:
|
|
WordPress |
Custom Built Site |
|
Initial Page Size |
2100KB |
642KB |
|
Total load time |
60 sec |
0.5 sec |
|
Initial page render time (DOM) |
4.5 sec |
0.3 sec |
We see that a custom built page loads 4 times faster, is displayed on the screen 4 seconds before the other, and that it is fully downloaded 59 seconds before the WordPress page.
Sometimes our WordPress page seems to load just fine – but we should always clear the browser cache before test page speed – so we see the page as a user visiting us for the first time.
And why is page speed so important?
If your web page takes more than 3 seconds to load, most users don't wait around.
Google favours fast pages. Faster pages will boost their search engine ranking when compared to slower loading pages.
There are alternatives to WordPress that will save the extra investment in the long run.
