i’m getting to the stage where i need a more ‘pro’ looking website for my business than the home brew (a mix of opencart, wordpress blog and a front end made in serif webplus) i’ve gotten away with for the last few years.

just been told to look at wordpress.org (by a company wanting me to pay them to build me a site) as a way of integrating my content, shop section/products and blog.

i thought wp was just a blog thing, i’ll admit i’m not stunningly techy about these things, so can anyone give me some unbiased views please – good or bad.

Use wordpress for a club blog but just started using sqaurespace for a business idea i am starting and I prefer the latter (with squarespace you get a domain name included if you pay for 2 years or so) The squarespace user interface is nice, so you can use as a blog/portfolio and also there is commerce built in.

There are plenty of discounts codes also (i got mine off of the pen addict podcast)

WP evolved years ago from being predominantly a blogging platform to more of an all-rounder. Avoid the free themes, get a theme from the likes of ThemeForest or TemplateMonster for the princely sum of say £20-£50 and you’re away.

Plenty of plugins available to do all kinds of funky stuff too.

We use wordpress as our corporate website – but we have a developer who’s a guru at wordpress/php, so it’s been customised to our needs.

We use WP for our company site and the result looks very slick, but as above we had a top-notch web designer mate knock it up.

Still only cost £300 or so, if that helps.

Thanks guys. Would there be any chance you could let me know your websites so I can have a look, please email me if you prefer not to post them on the forum. The template thing was my concern but I’m interested that you had customised ones.

also worth checking out that any plugins/themes you use are actively maintained, as lot’s of people create poor plugins for WP then then lead to site compromises.

WordPress works really well for me, but worth looking at wordpress.org rather than .com for fully featured ecommerce

HTH

here’s our club one

pretty handy, some clever tools

WordPress with Woo-commerce is a great option for smaller online retail operations. I looked at many options before I chose it for the Singletrack Shop

WordPress makes up a significant proportion of the internet these days. Put it this way, if you were to fall out with your web company for any reason, you’d not have any trouble finding a new developer who is familiar with it.

I’m WordPress. I got a really basic theme and customized it all by learning (through google) some CSS and php basics and prodding at things with firebug. There is pretty much none of the original theme left. I think it’s great to use and you can just plug things in to do what you want, like my galleries for example. I’m happy with it and although I accept my website isn’t perfect, I think you have to admit its pretty ok given that its been done by someone who didn’t know even how to get hosting a few years ago! The great thing about WordPress is that there is so much documentation online to help you learn how to do things. BasqueMTB

Even this site is wordpress based isn’t it? It’s an out the box php site which you can customise to do what ever you want.

I have used the free virtue theme now from Kadence on 3 sites now and have virtually no experience previous to building websites. It also has woo commerce on the premium version.

http://www.kadencethemes.com/

Loads of commercial sites are done in WP. I just launched our corporate one this week built that way. Lots of designers and expertise out there.

WordPress works very well for me – the big advantage is I can tweak the site very easily from multiple locations, even from my phone.

http://www.kinetics.us

Even this site is wordpress based isn’t it?

Yes

thanks guys. thats really appreciated.

I am barely computer literate and I made:
http://www.sconetomongolia.com
in a few hours using wix.com
I know it works out slightly more expensive as you can’t export your page to other hosts but it is just so easy to work with.