Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of Wordpress websites. I have to admit that some of their templates are really well done. What surprised me today was I found out that some of my design competitors are starting to offer Wordpress website design services.
Since I don’t know a lot about Wordpress, I wanted to find out why professional designers on this forum, who are using Freeway Pro, chose this application and workflow over other options, like Wordpress, Muse, Joomla, Drupal, or others.
I wanted to find out why professional designers on this forum, who are using Freeway Pro, chose this application and workflow over other options, like Wordpress, Muse, Joomla, Drupal, or others.
Since I don’t know a lot about Wordpress, I wanted to find out why professional designers on this forum, who are using Freeway Pro, chose this application and workflow over other options, like Wordpress, Muse, Joomla, Drupal, or others.
With regard to WP and thanks to its hugely active dev community it’s easy to add complex dynamic functionality to a site with point-n-click plugins, and given the numerous templates almost anyone can throw together a nice looking site with minimal effort or knowledge of design or code, if that’s what you want. That, in part, goes a long way to understanding its popularity. I recently took over this WP site http://michaelrookeronline.com and while prior to this my WP experience was very minimal having some time under my belt with it I can see why it’s so popular, because it’s pretty much plug-n-play. But (big but) from what I’ve heard designing a WP template from scratch can be a rather daunting undertaking technically, and while I haven’t touched the original design of the above site I’m certain it will not be an easy job when I do.
A CMS like MODx is in my opinion a much nicer app than WP (at least as far as the designer is concerned) though it doesn’t have nearly the community resources of WP, though it has gained a lot of ground the past few years. In short, WP makes it easy to add the technical bells and whistles that clients like without the technical learning curve in most cases.
Also, what are the benefits of Freeway Pro over some of the other web development apps that I mentioned?
Very simple answer: At it’s most basic level of use, Freeway requires no html knowledge in order to produce an acceptably professional looking and functioning site. Because of Freeway’s desktop publishing metaphor it is very easy to create a decent web site without knowing much of anything about web sites by anyone with a background in desktop publishing. I would wager that most designers who come to Freeway represent that demographic.
Having said that there are limitations using Freeway that can “mostly” be skirted with some pushing (i.e. hand coding). I’m not familiar with Muse, but the others are all CMS systems that rely on dynamic content filling pre-defined templates and those templates can have strict formatting rules that Freeway cannot follow. Although it is possible to create Joomla templates using Freeway and a third part Action suite, the others are a bit problematic.
Speaking to your “professional” question It’s safe to say that if you want high budget clients with big web demands then learning about hand coding a web site is necessary. HTML, CSS, PHP, MYSQL for starters. As Walt can attest using Freeway in this situation is just a way of producing the bare bones “look” to a site that then can be massaged with a text editor to add the backend muscles. But if your clients are a low budget sort of crowd who have never heard of Drupal or WordPress and don’t need a lot of high end ecommerce sorts of functionality then Freeway can produce very acceptable results, and does.
BTW, I checked out your website and your contact form is really cool. I’m assuming you used Freeway Pro to construct it, but I’m curious as to what other actions or scripts you used.
At this point, ALL of my website customers are small businesses with limited budgets, which is one of the reasons I chose Freeway Pro as a development platform. And yes, I too come from a print background, which is reason number two.
I’m not ready to invest the time to learn Dreamweaver or coding, but I am interested in Joomla. In fact, I’ll probably setup my own business website using that language just to get some hands on expereince.
Thanks for your post.
On 16 Jan 2012, 6:37 pm, chuckamuck wrote:
Very simple answer: At it’s most basic level of use, Freeway requires no html knowledge in order to produce an acceptably professional looking and functioning site. Because of Freeway’s desktop publishing metaphor it is very easy to create a decent web site without knowing much of anything about web sites by anyone with a background in desktop publishing. I would wager that most designers who come to Freeway represent that demographic.
Having said that there are limitations using Freeway that can “mostly” be skirted with some pushing (i.e. hand coding). I’m not familiar with Muse, but the others are all CMS systems that rely on dynamic content filling pre-defined templates and those templates can have strict formatting rules that Freeway cannot follow. Although it is possible to create Joomla templates using Freeway and a third part Action suite, the others are a bit problematic.
Speaking to your “professional” question It’s safe to say that if you want high budget clients with big web demands then learning about hand coding a web site is necessary. HTML, CSS, PHP, MYSQL for starters. As Walt can attest using Freeway in this situation is just a way of producing the bare bones “look” to a site that then can be massaged with a text editor to add the backend muscles. But if your clients are a low budget sort of crowd who have never heard of Drupal or WordPress and don’t need a lot of high end ecommerce sorts of functionality then Freeway can produce very acceptable results, and does.
The problem with being the most popular is… it doesn’t always give you an idea of if it’s the best for what you need. Originally Wordpress was blog engine and it was launched around a decade ago… So its been around a far amount of time to build up a far sized following, but at heart its still a blog system.
We as a company have used Wordpress for real jobs and employed for the first project very, very experienced wordpress developers and to be honest, we found out it’s limitations really, really quickly (halfway through the first job). The problem we had with it was that for us, it just seems to be built the wrong away around…
We design visually first with eye on functionality, and ease of use, and unfortunately thats where we found the flaws in the Wordpress system. We designed a site that turned out to be a monumental challenge for wordpress, We had to pour a massive amount of time to get things to work in the way that we wanted them to work, with an end result that the project overran it cost to develop and ultimately had compromises which would not have been there if we had created a bespoke CMS. Its a lesson we haven’t forgotten with the result that we have not used Wordpress again and moved over to CMS systems. I am sure if you find the perfect theme to suite your design then Wordpress is a fantastic system but for us that route means that we would be competing on what would in reality be price alone which is a nonstarter.
Quite frankly, we are very pleased with Freeway Pro. It has allowed us to do everything we want and more, even when we needed to code something special.
Plus, I can’t begin to tell you how valuable it is having people such as Walter, Dave, Tim, and Joe online, who are more than willing to help whenever one of us gets stuck. I’m also really encouraged to see a lot of professional designers who use Freeway Pro too.
…but I am interested in Joomla. In fact, I’ll probably setup my own business website using that language just to get some hands on experience.
I highly recommend starting with a good book on Joomla! first to get an idea on how all the parts work, what is necessary, and what can be left out. The Action suite I mentioned expects you to understand something about how a Joomla! site is constructed and doesn’t offer instruction beyond the basics of using the actions.
it would be outermost interesting on what CMS functions you are after. Not that I want to create confusion but often I recognize, that the so called heavy weight ones eg Joomla, Drupal or ExpressionEngine are so overwhelming for a lot of clients (and designer :-)).
I know that the smaller CMS’s are limited to some point (cause they do not have SQL behind to store some addition stuff - but it would be cool to figure out where the limitations to the big ones really are - and probably find any hack around.
It should be said that I fight on Max’s side to get the (now for free) basic WebYep extended and as far as I know, there are not “so much” things missing.
So if you and of course all the others could tell their needs this could be a valuable thing.
Mine (my clients) are by the way:
Edits single entries on the page
Create new pages
Input some PDF-stuff
Change some images
Probably a simple Blog-System
I’m actually working on a “Template System” for WebYep that shall be finally:
Installed and edited within minutes
and with a little bit of the help of Photoshop totally face-lifted but I actually stuck a bit within the project that is:
BTW, I checked out your website and your contact form is really cool. I’m assuming you used Freeway Pro to construct it, but I’m curious as to what other actions or scripts you used.
Hi RavenManiac,
Sorry for the late reply but I missed this one. The site was not created with FW but was hand-coded. The form eye-candy (fading icons) is done with jQuery and the form processing and back-end admin area is done with the MyActiveRecord or MAR, php framework, as provided by Walter.
Nice looking site. I think this is an obvious question, but when you took over this site, did you use FreeWay to do it? Or did you completely abandon FreeWay and work within the WordPress framework?
Thanks!
Doty
On Jan 16, 2012, at 12:12 PM, Todd wrote:
I recently took over this WP site http://michaelrookeronline.com and while prior to this my WP experience was very minimal having some time under my belt with it I can see why it’s so popular, because it’s pretty much plug-n-play.
I took it over as a self-contained WP site. Any tweaking I’ve done with regard to the layout (not much so far) was done with a text editor (Coda). As far as any WP-specific functionality it’s pretty much plug-n-play with plug-ins. I haven’t used FW in years.
Todd
Twitter: @ImXiiro
Skype: toddbrilliant
On Feb 11, 2012, at 11:15 AM, Doty wrote:
Hi Todd,
Nice looking site. I think this is an obvious question, but when you took over this site, did you use FreeWay to do it? Or did you completely abandon FreeWay and work within the WordPress framework?
Thanks!
Doty
On Jan 16, 2012, at 12:12 PM, Todd wrote:
I recently took over this WP site http://michaelrookeronline.com and while prior to this my WP experience was very minimal having some time under my belt with it I can see why it’s so popular, because it’s pretty much plug-n-play.
Wordpress is the platform especially for blogging, easy to use and also it’s a open source. This info covers the major things about wordpress. Refer: http://bit.ly/1xeuTOp
On Wed, Feb 4, 2015 at 12:02 PM, peter email@hidden wrote:
Wordpress is the platform especially for blogging, easy to use and also it’s a open source. This info covers the major things about wordpress. Refer: http://bit.ly/1xeuTOp
I think WP is great for functionality and mobile friendly sites. The site that I am working with was orginally a hand coded site and now I am in the process of turning it into a wordpress site. WP is awesome in that you can use it on windows or mac
I started switching all of my sites over to WP after I found the support and info on FP 7 responsive site building to be so lacking. I also appreciate the simplicity of plugins for WP. It is very user friendly.
