If you ask a designer, the right CMS is the one that allows the most flexible yet consistent visitor experience. Ask a developer, and it’s the one that’s most powerful under the hood. Ask a client, and it’s the one that allows them to make edits the easiest without impairing their ability to get through to their visitors effectively.
While there’s likely no perfect CMS, there is also something to the idea that the right tool is the one that sits in the sweet spot between all of these requirements in the Venn diagram.
For Adjacent, that tool is WordPress. So why do we use it?
User Experience
When we started Adjacent, we were even smaller than we are now, and couldn’t afford to be constantly inundated with emails and phone calls from clients needing help with website edits. It was absolutely critical that we be able to craft custom, friendly editing experiences for our clients.
Equally important was that the CMS didn’t impede our ability to create beautiful, fast, and responsive front-facing designs for our clients’ website visitors.
Extensibility
Need to be able to put up staff photos? Syndicate news articles across the site? Add product details in a specific format? Guide visitors with maps to your locations? No problem. Using WordPress, we are able to implement custom interfaces for anything your custom content and needs dictate.
In addition, if you’re using other platforms for mailing lists, e-commerce, video/audio hosting, etc., it’s likely that there is already a way to connect it with WordPress to integrate with your content seamlessly.
Prevalence and Stability
According to W3Techs, WordPress powers more than 30% of all websites today. Of course, popularity doesn’t equate to supremacy, but it does come with a few perks.
WordPress is battle-tested. It’s been around awhile, and its stability is the result of 15 years of constant refinement. And because it’s open-source, its code gets vetted and improved upon by many people.
This popularity also comes with a reasonable assumption that the technology powering your site won’t fade into obsolescence—WordPress sites are built using commonly available technology, can be served from most hosting platforms, and the core is updated frequently and quickly to respond to any security threats that arise.
As a studio, we’re focused on WordPress, not because we think it’s the only tool that can solve the problems we do, but because we are confident that WordPress’ strengths, combined with our experience and expertise, strikes the best balance between delivering quality websites to visitors and flexible editing experiences to clients—and all at an efficiency that makes us proud.
