With WordPress one of the key questions you have to ask yourself is should I have a custom theme built for my website or should I use a premium theme that I can purchase?
My answer depends on a few things:
Depending on your answers, I can come up with an option for you.
Type of Business
I always think people in creative fields should lean towards more custom themes. For instance, I look at some website designer’s website and I see a purchased theme, to me that doesn’t seem quite right. I mean if your selling your creativity, you should at least show you are creative, right? However, for many professions, or small businesses, a premium theme is fine. There are thousands, and with some customizations, you can make it your own.
Time to Market
If you are in a rush to get a site done, then your answer is simple, go with a nice premium theme which will cut the time down by 60-70%. If you have months, then you can consider a custom design. As the design process takes a couple of weeks on average, and building a custom theme can add a few weeks, you can see where time to market is considerably longer.
Budget
If you have a small budget, then go with a premium theme. If you have $2000 and up you can consider the custom design route. The reason is that having designs created takes time and money. And coding a custom theme can take weeks, which is where the cost adds up.
So, I know you are going to ask, what do I prefer? Well, in a perfect world, a custom, unique theme is what I prefer. But in reality, the things we spoke about come into play. Budget and time to market are so important. Whichever way you go, you can have a great site. If you aren’t sure, then ask me. I am happy to help you decide.
The Oxford English dictionary defines a webmaster this way:
A webmaster (from web and master), also called a web architect, web developer, site author, or website administrator, is a person responsible for maintaining one or many websites.
It is funny, most people in my profession don’t really want this title. They want to design, or perhaps call themselves UX Designers, User Interface Specialists, Information Architect, etc. But once that site goes live, they say: BYE BYE. They have no interest in maintaining websites. It isn’t fun or sexy as designing the sites. They want to move on to the next project. This is why many of their sites fail and fail miserably.
As you have probably gotten tired of me saying “Stale = Fail”. But it is truer today than ever before. Which is why we proudly wear the webmaster hat. No, every text edit or change we make to sites is a barrel of laughs. But we serve a vital purpose and are happy to fill that role for our clients. I wanted RooSites to be a full service internet company. To me this means, being able to design, develop and manage websites. The webmaster role of course is the last part of our offering, the management of your site. This is as important or perhaps more important as the the other 2/3rds of our offering.
To me, this is a lot like a car. You design it, then you build it, and then you service it. No matter how well you design and build it, without the service and maintenance, the car will break down.
So while others may not want to handle the webmaster role, I embrace it. If your company doesn’t have a webmaster, contact us today.
