GeekPAK

If you have very basic needs and you don’t have any special requirements, WordPress is a great value. If you don’t mind using a pre-designed template and if your requirements don’t stray much beyond the base features of WordPress then WordPress is a great value. If you have some basic technical skills and can do most of the WordPress setup yourself, then WordPress is a great value.

It’s clear that for many bloggers WordPress is a great value and works quite well for them. We’re not trying to disparage WordPress, it appears to be quite good at the basic functions it performs. In fact coming soon we’ll be giving WordPress a quick technical review of pros, cons and things to consider.

However, if you are a professional or if you are a business and you need to produce a professional website, then you are less likely to get away with the $0 WordPress price tag.

Because we at GeekPAK believe in putting your money where your mouth is, we recently did a WordPress site to get a sense of how long it would take to implement a relatively modest business website using the free blog software.

The Situation:

1. Design:
The client needed something more than a template so they hired a professional designer to design the look and feel of their new site.

2. Templates:
The designer chose several different inexpensive templates as a starting point for features, but no single template could accommodate all of the needs of the client.

3. Plugins:
In addition to the features of the templates the client also had several requirements that required additional code and plugins

4. Development & Implementation
Because the requirements of the client exceeded any of the straight forward features of WordPress, the custom templates and the plugins, the designer needed a technical member of the team to stitch all of the technical pieces together while implementing the custom visual design. Enter GeekPAK.


The Bottom Line
By the time the client got done paying for design time, purchasing templates and paying for our time to put all the pieces together, they had invested as much money in the free WordPress as they might have spent on a more professional solution like GeekPAK or one of a host of other CMS tools out there.

What’s more, because WordPress is a blog, not a CMS, the client received less features, less flexibility and a far more limited upgrade path for the future of their business.

Speaking purely from an economic perspective, in this case, free cost the client more than if they had simply bitten the bullet and invested in a tool like GeekPAK lite. They ended up spending the same money for far less features and far fewer results.


Stay tuned as we delve into a more technical discussion of WordPress coming soon.