• Hi,

    I am designing a website for a client who wants to have a blog/news feed integrated into her site. She wants to be able to log in to an admin panel and post news onto her site.

    I am trying to determine whether I should build the entire website in WordPress or, conversely, build the site in PHP and then integrate a wordpress blog into the desired page.

    Which is more efficient and simpler? I am fairly new to web design and very new to PHP, but am a fast leaner. If I decide to build the entire site in WordPress, is it likely that I will run into constraints regarding what I can do with image galleries and other sections of the site?

    Thanks for your advice!

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  • My opinion…

    I started a site much like you described, and had a WordPress blog integrated into it on a separate page. I quickly realized that I would have been much better off just doing the entire site in WordPress, and it would have saved me a tremendous amount of time. I ultimately converted the entire site to WordPress, and never looked back.

    WordPress will do everything out of the box that meets your goals. You can develop a website with multiple static pages like a regular websie, and assign one page as your blog. WordPress displays great flexiblity, has great documentation, many available plugins and add-ons, and has an extensive online community.

    If there are limitations, I’m not aware of any, at least at my level. Most of it appears to be in the choice of themes, some being easier to use, maintain, and implement than others. For that reason, I prefer to do my own.

    What are the aims of the site: if it’s a simple brochure site with a dynamic blog then you’ll want to create the entire site out of WordPress with pages and posts.

    If you want some sort of fancy integration (where you want to use your own PHP), unless you’re going to code it in to WordPress as a plugin or if you could do it as a single page template, then I’d go for the site and then put the blog in to a subdirectory (but make them look the same).

    I too had this issue put before me, and the above posters are right : it kind of depends on all you want to do.

    Here is what I did:

    I made a list of the features I needed on the site (blog, about pages, galleries, feedback forms, polls, etc.). Then I looked around to see if wordpress (base functions, themes and plugins could support it).

    I discovered that there is very little you CANNOT do with wordpress.

    There are a ton of great sites out there using wordpress as a cms (do a search ‘wordpress as a cms’ for tons of articles on this topic).

    My first site is getting firmed up, and I am considering converting another to wordpress (the next one is a light use wiki and a forum).

    best of luck, and have a nice day.

    ~ Dpak
    (edited for a typo).

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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