Wordpress is still a rockstar in 2020
It’s been a while since I created with websites, but I now had the opportunity and I was glad to find out that no-one could beat the #1 CMS in the world in the past 5 years.
A few month ago a friend of mine approached me and asked if I could help setting up a new website for his gym. He said he has already viewed many Youtube videos how to do it, but he just not a tech guy. I said: “Sure, why not? Beside my 9–5 job, 2 kids and marathon training I have plenty of free time… :)”. On the other hand I was really curious because I love creating stuff from zero. So the deal was on: for a pair of running shoes I jumped onto the Wordpress train again.
The first CMS I worked with was Joomla back in 2011, it was 2.x something and I remember it has tons of limitations (which are resolved by now). At that time I had a cool website idea for which Joomla seemed suitable but later the whole thing when to the trash, I did not have time to finish it. At my 9–5 job I got a new opportunity, I moved from being the leader of a coupon website (Groupon clone) to being the tech and marketing lead of 3 local newsportals. They were migrated to Wordpress and it was love at first sight for me. Despite the differences it was super easy to learn and manage even though it was a multi-lingual site for 3 countries.
Back then I also had a side hustle, a wedding webshop which was a custom php solution from 2008. I migrated that one as well to Wordpress and loved every moment of it. I could have a blog, it was faster, I had cool images and features and all many by a few simple clicks. For the shop I chose the WooCommerce plugin, which worked like a charm.
In 2015 I took a different direction, for my 30th birthday a present for myself was to learn how to build mobile apps (Android to be more specific). After some private projects I got a new job as IT development manager at the largest Hungarian telco (Telekom) and I was responsible for numerous mobile applications. So bye-bye websites… I haven’t seen any Wordpress installation since it’s 3.x-4.x versions.
And here we are in 2020. It’s Wordpress 5.5 at the time of writing. I assisted my dear friend how to buy a storage and domain and I finally had the chance to install a brand new Wordpress again. I must say I missed it so much. The shiny and clean backend, the plugins, the possibilities, the CSS, wow. It’s still be best and no-one will beat it for a very very long time. It’s not a surprise most of the sites run on this free CMS solution.
It’s been 5 years and the routine came back in a few second. I found everything, which is really great. I was shocked by how many awesome new features were added to the core of Wordpress (gallery, widgets, embeds).
If I had to compare it to Android apps it is way more consistent. When I open an app which I have not touched for a few month I have to make sure I have plenty for free time to re-import the latest SDKs, maybe update Android Studio, migrate the whole project to AndroidX, resolve the new bugs, etc. Wordpress is consistently great throughout the years, because it’s base is great. It was though through from the very beginning.
So we kicked off, the template was found within minutes and I was ready to build this simple and easy site. Well, at least I thought, since most entrepreneurs just want a simple, static website. But the deeper we go into the project they have more and more cool ideas… :)
My favourite part of this project was how fast I could react to new feature requests or modifications thanks to the huge number of plugins and descriptions available. I will give you interesting examples here.
Can we have a form on the site so users can apply for a program? Sure, bro, I know there were tons of form plugins out there. Also, can we have sliders in which users can choose from a set of values? Hmmm. I guess it should not be a big deal for Wordpress and I was right. I soon found WPForm which was suitable for this feature. The only limitation for the free version is that you can only collect applications via mail and not on the backend. I have check with my friend and he said he can live with it.
Can we display how many kilos the clients have lost with numbers counting up / down? Here I could send the prototype within 10 (yes, exactly) minutes. For this feature I used the CountUp.js plugin which perfectly did the job after some configuration. The final code looked like this (since it could not count below 0):
[countup start=”0" duration=”5" prefix=”Weight: -” suffix=” kg” more options here]34[/countup]
Later on also fat loss and muscle mass increase were added, but that was a piece of cake.
Can we have a floating button for promoting application but only a specific page? This was not easy because there are many plugins for floating action button (FAB), but most of them are paid and well, you guessed right… configuring on which pages to show the button was always included in the paid plan. The most suitable one would have been the Buttonizer, but paying 74 USD for this one tiny feature did not seem reasonable. Luckily I found a nice solution which did exactly the same. I just had to add a tiny code to the css:
img, a img { border: 0; }
#badge1
{
position: fixed;
z-index: 1;
right: 0;
box-shadow: 5px 0px 0px #888888;
top: 200px;
}
And another one on the page itself:
<div id="badge1"><a href="url"><img title="Image title here" src="sourceurl" alt="alt" /></a></div>
Worked perfectly with 0 cost!
Can have 4 images on the welcome slider instead of 3? This was the part I got really angry. Not at my friend but at the template I chose a few days ago. Turned out that modifying this took much more brain power than it should have since the template creators hid this very well :) But anyway after about 2 days it was working. You could set 4 images in the backend easily and all of them were visible. Guess what? When the page went live it had 3 (three) images, just like originally supported by the template. Calm down, man…
I think that was all for the fun features and there were some compulsory ones where were perfectly supported by Wordpress (Google Analytics integration, Cookie concent, etc.). By the way there were many features which I have talked my friend out of. Eg: have videos on the slider instead of images (would increase site load), have a downloadable PDF instead of a page (no way) and getting him out of the desktop-first mindset which I think is shockingly present for many entrepreneurs out there.
To sum up I must say I had a lot of fun and I can’t wait to have another project like this. Another friend had a post on Facebook where he asked if someone could build him a simple website. I replied within 10 minutes, but the “job” was already taken. I guess many people enjoy building WP sites :)
I still cannot say that you can jump into site development without any coding experience, but it’s getting easier and easier.