Here at Oddbee, we use WordPress as our primary website building tool. With its user-friendly interface, extensive plugin ecosystem, scalability, and supportive community, this platform offers countless website creation options for beginners and advanced users.
Generally speaking, there are 3 main ways to build a WordPress website:
1. Using pre-built themes:
- Themes determine the overall design, appearance, and layout of your website. This includes elements like headers, footers, sidebars, typography, and colour schemes.
- You can choose themes from the WordPress Theme Directory or from third-party sources.
- Themes can be either free or premium (paid).
2. Using page builders:
- Page builders are tools often included in themes to help you create pages visually without needing to code.
- They add extra features to your theme, allowing you to create complex content like sliders, tabs, accordions, call-to-action buttons, forms, and more.
3. Custom WordPress Theme Design & Development:
- This involves creating a unique website design that fits your specific business needs, rather than using the design of a pre-built theme. Custom design allows you to fully convey your unique brand goals and identity, making your website stand out from competitors. With a custom theme, you can add or modify features as your business grows and evolves without being constrained by the limitations of pre-built themes.
- A custom site design is created first, and then it is translated into a custom WordPress theme.
Ready-made WordPress themes (like Divi) and page builders (like Elementor and WPBakery) have enough features to get a basic website up and running, but here are 7 reasons why we recommend against them:
- Code bloat: Page builders often introduce complex CSS and JavaScript, adding unnecessary code to your website. On a shared hosting plan with limited resources, this can affect your site’s performance.
- Compatibility issues: Pre-built themes and page builders often require many plugins to enable certain functionalities. The more plugins you have, the higher the likelihood that one of them will conflict with others, leading to display and functionality issues such as text alignment problems, mobile display issues, broken sliders, and improperly resized images.
- Lack of freedom: While page builders can be good for constructing complicated layouts quickly, they can also restrict your options for style and functionality as each one of those layouts comes pre-built and pre-styled.
- Too much freedom: Ironically, page builders also let you modify every aspect of certain elements on the page (from changing the button colour to adjusting the spacing around elements). This might sound good in theory, but over-customizing often leads to websites that lack coherence and brand consistency.
- Limited (or non-existent) tech support: One big downside to free WordPress themes is limited or slow support. Premium themes usually offer better support, but only for theme features, not customizations (for example, if you wanted to integrate a custom Google Maps with multiple locations to a theme, you would need to find a developer to extend that theme’s functionality).
- Security risks: There may also be security risks with “free” or cheap themes (reliance on older / vulnerable third-party code, outdated security practices, etc).
- False expectations: Prebuilt WordPress’ themes are often designed for an ideal scenario, with calculated photo, icon, and paragraph dimensions to appear “perfect” in demos. But when you add your own content, things often don’t look nearly as nice: text doesn’t fit, images are the wrong size, and icons style clashes with the site’s look and feel.
So how do we do it at Oddbee?
Starting Fresh: We design and build custom websites that are tailored to clients’ needs. Although ready-made themes might appear quicker to use, understanding their structure and making specific adjustments usually requires a significant amount of time and effort.
Keeping It Simple: Our custom themes rely on a minimal number of plugins which results in a smaller codebase to maintain and fewer dependencies on other libraries. Why is that important? It minimises the risks associated with external code changes, obsolete or deprecated functionalities, or security vulnerabilities.
Staying Safe: Pre-built themes, especially those that aren’t updated regularly, can become vulnerable over time. With a custom theme, you have more control over security measures and can ensure regular updates. It means no surprises, no hidden functionalities, and no limitations on what you can do with it in the future.
Making It Truly Yours: A custom theme, developed from scratch, means that we can build it exactly as you would see it in our design mockups. We can also add features that not all themes and / or page builders would have, such as event calendar, integration with third-party software, or cross-posting across multiple sites.
Simplifying Content Entry: To extend WordPress functionality and allow for more content flexibility, we use the ACF (Advanced Custom Fields) plugin to create custom page blocks, providing a simple and intuitive backend for content management. For example, you can choose from a “Columns” block, a “Call to Action” block, or a “Testimonials” block, add the necessary content, and it will seamlessly integrate into the website’s structure and design. This allows you to create a virtually unlimited number of unique pages without needing to write any code, learn complex tools, or risk disrupting the overall site design. We also provide a training session at every website hand off and offer bug fixes for a month after site launch.
Conclusion
At Oddbee, we advocate for custom WordPress development, ensuring a site tailored to individual client needs, optimised performance, and reduced security risks. While pre-built themes and page builders can provide quick fixes, they often come with limitations, potential security vulnerabilities, and complications in the long run. By prioritising a custom approach, we streamline backend processes, ensure design integrity, and provide support and flexibility needed for an enduring online presence.