One of the cool things about MITTERA is that we work with organizations of all sizes: family-owned small businesses, local nonprofits, large state universities and even presidential campaigns. We’ve arrived at this point, in part, because we’re WordPress people at heart. It’s the most user-friendly content management system (CMS) out there, and this team is exceptional at leveraging it to help our clients succeed.
WordPress uses themes to create the visual style of a website. These themes are largely comprised of page templates. Page templates have a series of selection boxes, drop-downs, and text fields that allow administrative users to simply fill out the fields, and the resulting page looks great. It also error-proofs things so novice users can create compelling pages too.
For sites with a small number of pages that won’t need many future changes, it’s great.
But as great as WordPress is, it’s not without shortcomings — one of those being flexibility.
Specialization VS. Generalization : The “IT Question” of Business
For sites that must adapt to an ever-shifting business landscape (sometimes rapidly), it can be a nightmare. It turns into a constant back-and-forth between the client and development team.
“Can you move this text to the left rather than the right? “
“Can we make this image gallery wider? “
“Can I add the news feed to this page?”
“Can you make this a 4-column grid rather than a 3-column grid?”
“Can we move this text block so that it’s above that image?”
There’s a frustration level that accompanies these interactions regardless of whether “yes” is the answer to the questions above.
The customer gets tired of asking for adjustments (they’ve got normal job duties to attend to), and the development team is tasked with something akin to catching a greased pig. (No thanks.)
The good news is that this can be helped, which brings me back to why WordPress is the best CMS out there.
It’s open-sourced.
That means it has a vast development community of extremely smart people that help shore up its shortcomings in the form of plug-ins. Nearly 20 percent of the web is powered by WordPress. That’s pretty astounding, and plug-ins are a major contributing factor to the high adoption rate.
WP Bakery is one such plug-in that has helped us address the flexibility issues of WordPress. It’s a visual composer that let’s you “build any layout you can imagine with drag and drop page builder plugin – no programming knowledge required.”
To help you determine if WP Bakery is right for you, here is a list of the pros and cons:
Pros
- Create your own page layouts
- Easily adjust existing layouts
- Adjust visual styles on a per page basis
- Visualize your page layout while you’re building it
- Increased website stability
- Increased website longevity (you won’t feel like you need to redesign the site in 3 years)
- Extensive support documentation
- Woocommerce Integration
- Drag and drop interface
Cons
- WP Bakery is not turn-key, despite claims made on their website.
- Technical support team required for properly integrating with your custom WordPress theme.
- Requires extensive user interface preparation
- More expensive up front cost than simple pre-built page templates
We’re really excited to have WP Bakery as an option for the custom themes we build. We’re able to create a better product, and the client feels empowered with a website that’s flexible, uniquely tailored to their visual style, and easy to manage.
– Jacob Heflin, UX Designer at MITTERA
