There are arguments for and against different CMSs and WordPress is certainly no exception, rather than whey up pros and cons of all these different platforms I thought I’d go over why we use WordPress for the majority of our builds, so you can see it from an agencies perspective.
For myself and many of our clients WordPress has one of the most user friendly interfaces going, it’s geared up to be intuitive and consistent in design so users can easily gain familiarity when using their site. Generally speaking options are centralised if you have a page with custom options they can generally be found in the backend for that particular page rather than having to go to a number of different options page to set something up.
To put it quite plainly WordPress is open source, meaning that for any project whether it be commercial or not there isn’t a license fee to use the software. What the parent company Automattic would like from its users is for contribution to be made, which doesn’t just include coding. So the only costs really are for development, so if you have a ready design and you come to us the only charge you’ll receive is for the time it takes for us to convert your design into a working build.
With so many plugins to utilise there’ll be times when we need to customise an off the shelf solution to ensure it functions in a specific way. Now rather than starting from scratch more often than not there’ll be others with similar goals and that’s where the WordPress community comes in, forums provide a wealth of information which can really save a lot of time in the long run and again if you’re paying for a developer this time can often be reduced through the knowledge shared by the WordPress community.
For myself WordPress is a platform I know in depth, there are always updates and new things to learn but focussing on one platform and not spreading myself too thin across different platforms seems like a logical choice. We’re also not limited like some hosted platforms to the plugins provided, we can create custom functions to achieve desired outcomes which is essential when creating our sites.