Why does anyone still pay to have a custom site developed when WordPress seems to be able to do everything with the right plugins?

[Linus No Beard]

I recently made a site with WordPress because I originally wanted a custom site before I saw how much some guy in Timbuktu with no English skills was charging per custom page on fiver.

Then I remembered that WordPress is free so I tried it out and I made a site in 2 days that was miles better then then anything I could of got custom in my price range. I literately was able to make a fully featured site with no training in design or web coding with a full blog, multiple pages, contact form, comment system, and links to games. I bet if I took the time to learn it more I could do even more with it.

So that leads me to the question of why people and small business pay upwards of $1000 to have a custom site when they can spend at most a week to make a website 100x better with WordPress?

 

Do you have any ideas or anecdotes of working with WordPress vs paying someone to make a fully custom site?

 

[Aaron_T]

I agree with you, most individuals and startups don't need a custom site.

 

One reason why an entity might want to pay a contractor for a custom site is just "division of labor" or "don't have the time myself" because their business takes all their time.

And it's worth mentioning, the above is for very entry level situations. When a company grows and gets a large customer base, you need custom engineered back and front ends for your web presence. Site reliability, support for a large user base, and a feature rich interface don't tend to happen easily with off the shelf tools unless your org is doing something that's very "cookie cutter". Then typically what happens as an organization grows, is that the engineering time and effort shifts from primarily customer facing to internal tooling to make your own employees faster and more efficient at their work.

[mononymous]

You can have a security vulnerability. This was a wordpress based site and was a shop as well as a support page for those who bought the products. One of the plugins was set to default settings, so images of invoices for proof of purchase was easily viewable through the url. Personal info like name, address, phone number and email address were present. 

 

When I contacted the company they were in the process of building a new site. The company is relatively new (circa 2013) so it is probable that they built the original site themselves but wasn't able to notice the security flaw. 

[manikyath]

because not everyone is fluent in creative design, UX design, and SEO.

 

you're not paying for some neckbeard to punch HTML into notepad for you, you're paying for someone who knows what he's doing to set stuff up for you, with a system that lets the computer-inept management make small adjustments.

 

there's defenately plenty of 'splash and dash' so-called web designers out there, that'll charge stupid amounts of money for a website right out of 2004, but that doesnt mean the business as a whole is problematic.

 

also, another thing:

14 minutes ago, Linus No Beard said:

small business pay upwards of $1000 to have a custom site when they can spend at most a week to make a website 100x better with WordPress?

a week worth of employee hours might be worth a lot more than $1000 to a business. it's not only about the payroll of the employee, it's also the fact that that person is not spending that week doing something else - like dealing with customers.

also - i severely doubt "100x better".

i've seen a lot of wordpress sites, i've also seen a lot of work from web developer consultancies.. and i'd take the consultancy work over "punched into wordpress on a saturday" websites any day.

 

in a sense - it's the squarespace argument: you can throw up a brilliant website with squarespace in an afternoon, even if you are creatively challenged. but that doesnt mean that your website will be welcoming and easy to use for your customers, and a lot of those sites end up looking so alike that occasionally you arrive on a company website and think "hm.. squarespace." before even looking further into the company itself. it's not because you *can* make a good website, that you *will* make a good website.

 

and this:

31 minutes ago, Linus No Beard said:

I bet if I took the time to learn it more I could do even more with it.

is the very concept why consultancy was invented: the company just really doesnt want to bother with figuring out how to do something and who to task it with.. so they just have someone who knows what they are doing step in and do the thinking for them.

 

1 minute ago, Aaron_T said:

startups don't need a custom site.

i disagree.

especially as a startup it's important to "stick out" from the competition. if someone at the company can whip up a "good enough" squarespace type site.. great. but if they dont, the potential time investment and potential 'exceptionally average' result might cost a lot more than having a consutlancy have their junior toss something up.

[Crunchy Dragon]

43 minutes ago, Linus No Beard said:

Do you have any ideas or anecdotes of working with WordPress vs paying someone to make a fully custom site?

When you pay someone else to make your site for you, you have the benefit of not needing to be an expert in everything necessary to make an inviting site.

 

The site will theoretically pay for itself if the site is able to attract enough business, so you need people good at marketing, graphic design, and a bunch of other things to make it inviting, easy to use, and ultimately a good site for your business.

 

Would you rather take your time and focus away from the business itself to do a job for a lower price yourself, or find a company with a good track record of making sites to do it for you, eat the cost, and make the money back?

[trag1c]

Everything depends on requirements and budget. Also custom from fiverr has a totally different meaning than custom from an actual developer. 99% of the listings you get on fiverr or similar sites will be purely loading a theme and plugins into a CMS like wordpress but not actual development. Actually designing, developing, testing, deploying and maintaining a web based software application is a ton of effort for anything beyond extremely simplistic. Even just requirements gathering and analysis can be time consuming. Then you also have things like SEO optimization so that you can target organic from reaching higher up on search engine results. 

 

I am not exactly a web developer as I work primarily in the embedded world, but right now I am working on a green field project that includes a web interface and I am already a few weeks into just the web portion of this project.

 

If I was charging contractor rates (lets say $100-150 an hour) I would already be billing out 16K on the low end for what little I currently have. So the $1000 you thought as lot is just enough to load a theme, some plugins and setup hosting. In other words sweet fuck all lol. And if you do somehow swing someone to write code for $1000 you're going to end up as a site distributing malware, plain text passwords, and sexually deviant media from when someone ultimately high jacks your site. Even on the wordpress sides if you get the wrong guy who gives you the wrong plugins you're in for a world of hurt.

[Linus No Beard]

1 minute ago, mononymous said:

Well I did find a site based on wordpress. It was a shop as well as a support page for those who bought the products. One of the plugins was set to default settings, so images of invoices for proof of purchase was easily viewable through the url. Personal info like name, address, phone number and email address were present. 

 

When I contacted the company they were in the process of building a new site. The company is relatively new (circa 2013) so it is probable that they built the the original site themselves but wasn't able to notice the security flaw. 

That sounds bad

4 minutes ago, Aaron_T said:

One reason why an entity might want to pay a contractor for a custom site is just "division of labor" or "don't have the time myself" because their business takes all their time.

That is kinda what I thought. Though still learning WordPress and making a site is so fast that at least for me the math does not work out to pay someone else to make a custom.

[Franck]

9 hours ago, Linus No Beard said:

pay upwards of $1000 to have a custom site

I haven't seen that price for website in decades lol

[Linus No Beard]

1 hour ago, Franck said:

I haven't seen that price for website in decades lol

It was just a number

[Guest]

WordPress is still complicated and still requires other setup and configuration. 

 

It might be simpler, but there's still a lot going into it. 

[Aaron_T]

19 hours ago, manikyath said:

i disagree.

especially as a startup it's important to "stick out" from the competition. if someone at the company can whip up a "good enough" squarespace type site.. great. but if they dont, the potential time investment and potential 'exceptionally average' result might cost a lot more than having a consutlancy have their junior toss something up.

I agree with you that my statement was too general. But I don't agree that the inverse is true.

It depends on the business and their goals. Startups that are consumer facing tend to need(and have) flashier, nicer, more modern UX.  Startups that are more business facing tend to not spend as much time and money on how good the UI looks (for better or worse). But these are still generalities and each organization will be different.

[Helly]

Running a business off a wordpress site with plugins is risky. You have to update wordpress itself to plug security holes. If your plugins are no longer in development and abandoned you are f*cked if they no longer work with the updated wordpress.

I have seen this happen. They had to hire a company to update the plugin for them multiple times a year to have it work again. That will cost you more then having a custom site build and maintained for you over the long run. The certainty that your site is up and fully working and secure all the time without having to worry about it is also worth a lot to companies.