A while back, I wrote up a post called "Light vs. Wordpress." Check it out if you haven't already. Today, I want to continue my comparison of these products, focusing on how much time it takes to utilize Wordpress as compared to Light. I have some first-hand experience to share here.
Recently, I've been tinkering around with Wordpress a lot for a personal website I run about Oklahoma City Restaurants. Why would I use Wordpress when my job is to sell Water, Sky and Light, our own content management systems? Well, for one thing, when I use Wordpress, I stay informed about how it works and what it offers. It's an advantage for me to be able to talk coherently about Wordpress to other designers who use it, so that we can discuss the pros and cons. And, it helps me be able to write posts like this one!
Also, as mentioned in part one, Wordpress does have some advantages over Light. You see, I like to tinker around with code and hosting and databases and all of that stuff, and I have at least enough knowledge to be able to make sense out of it (sort of). So, Wordpress is nice because if you like to do that kind of thing, you can customize it pretty much to your heart's content. If you think of something you wish it could do, the odds are good that you can search around and find a plugin for it.
But here's the thing, I am spending huge amounts of time on all of these little Wordpress configurations. Finding plugins, installing them, configuring them, testing them, searching forums if something isn't working ... etc. It's alot of fun mind you, but it is a huge consumer of time. So much so that I hardly have time to actually post content on the site, which seems that it should be more important than all of the configurations.
So, I'm thinking, here is a huge advantage of Light. I mean, if it takes me this long to tweak out a single Wordpress installation, what would it be like if I had several of them for my clients. Sure, I'd probably get faster at it with experience, but still! And then, what about when it comes time to upgrade the installations, every last one of them. Yikes!
While Wordpress does offer the advantage of extreme customizability, does it really offer enough advantage to justify the extra time commitment required? If it's your hobby, like it is for me, you might enjoy the tinkering. But if it's your business, time is money, right? With Light, someone else is taking care of all of the issues related to hosting, programming, coding, upgrades, backups ... etc. You can just add site after site rapidly and never have to look back. This is a huge advantage of Light over Wordpress. Trust me, I know!
Posted on
Thu, October 18, 2007
by Tim Wall