Do i need a CMS like Wordpress? Websites for local businesses

Hey,

I’m pretty new to webdevelopment and I have a question about my basic understanding of creating websites.

So I already created a few websites for my own learning and so I understand the basics of HTML/CSS/Javascript. But one thing that I can’t seem to find a answer for is how do I build a website for a local business, like a small carpentry business, so they can manage the website on their own?

For example if they built some new projects for customers they want to update their website to show off the new builds. With my current websites they would have to contact me so that I manually update their website within the code.

My first thought was a CMS like wordpress. Where I solely design the website and the customer himself can make future updates to the website to show off their new projects with the wordpress tools.

Is this really the only way to create such websites? Or are there some more “lightweight” custom CMS options?

I hope this question isn’t too dumb, I just can’t wrap my head around it right now. Since I’d like to focus on new projects in the future and not having to only add a few images to existing websites.

1 Like

It’s not the only way to create websites, but it sounds ideal to use WordPress in this particular situation. There are other CMS out there that you can use, such as Drupal or Joomla. As far as mentioning on how “lightweight” they are in comparison, I cannot comment as I have not personally used the latter two. WordPress may not seem like an exciting option for various reasons, such as slow page load speeds, code bloat and security issues. It can suck trying to figure out someone else’s theme just to make the simplest of tweaks. But if you tweak a WordPress site right you can really get the best out of it with optimisation plugins to make your site run a bit faster, SEO plugins to make it rank well on Google. There are many prebuilt themes out there which makes it easy to believe you can’t make a unique looking WordPress site, but if you wanna design and code your own theme from scratch, there is much fun and joy to be had from a developer’s perspective. The client can log in and change their content as they please.

I’d say go for WordPress and level up your skills as a theme developer. It powers around 35% of the entire web so you can’t go wrong if you want more work opportunities!

1 Like

WordPress is crazy flexible, but it is still very slanted toward blog content. Its internal API (what you’ll use to write anything custom) is ancient and awful beyond belief, and working with its database structure is no picnic either. And to this day, WP’s documentation is still not all that great. WP succeeds in spite of itself, and it’ll do anything you want it to, except for stab the developers who wrote it. :hocho::hocho::hocho:

I would recommend looking into Joomla or Drupal and seeing if those meet your site publishing needs.