Evan Carmichael compares WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal for integrating into existing websites. He recommends WordPress for its ease of use, low cost, massive plugin ecosystem, and abundance of affordable developers. He'd build his own site on WordPress today rather than create a custom CMS from scratch.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael.
Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. In today's video, I'm going to answer a question from one of my forum readers, Hertz Web Hosting, who wrote in asking about a content management system. So he wrote in the poll saying, "I'm looking to integrate a CMS, content management system, into an existing website." and would like the options as to which program has the most functionality, WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal. So thanks for the question. Great question for anybody setting up a website and trying to grow it. It's great to use a content management system instead of trying to do everything yourself. My opinion would be to use WordPress. And we've built our own custom content management system. This was built just before WordPress became kind of mainstream. So we had almost no choice but to do it ourselves. But we also do have WordPress on our site and have a couple of blogs that are WordPress-based. The reason why I like WordPress, a couple of reasons. One, it's really easy to set up. You could do most of the work yourself. You'll need, you know, a couple of hours of a programmer's time just to do all the implementation. But apart from that, you could do everything yourself. You can add content yourself, you can add pictures yourself, you can, you know, do whatever you want. Mostly yourself. A lot of the plugins you can add yourself, the updates you can do yourself. So a big challenge for a lot of entrepreneurs is always having to pay a web developer to help them make updates to their website. Where here, the power is in your hands to be able to update your website, you know, add content to it, make it look nice without having to pay somebody each time you do it. If you want to do a major upgrade, then yes, you'd have to have somebody come on board, but for most of the stuff that you're doing day to day, you don't need any help, which is great. I'm a big believer in not trying to spend a lot of money, especially as you're starting a business, until you're making money coming in. WordPress also has a lot of different themes, so you can pick a lot of different designs. There's a lot that are free and a lot that are really low cost, so you're not spending a lot of money to get a professional-looking design for your website as well. And it's very customizable, so you can— I've seen WordPress sites that are blogs, which everybody knows about, but also forums and a whole bunch of applications that you could turn— you wouldn't think is WordPress-based, what it is. There's a whole community of people who've developed around WordPress, I think more so than the other applications, that give you a lot of flexibility if you're trying to expand your company and offer a whole bunch of different content levels on your website. So I would definitely use WordPress. I think the last thing there is there's a lot of people who can get into WordPress really easily. To find a Joomla person or a Drupal programmer, it's a more specific skill set I found than finding somebody who can jump into WordPress. So if you do need to find a developer or your developer jumps ship, you have to go find another developer, it's pretty easy to find somebody who can understand WordPress, and a lot of the tools are already built. So it's easy to, you know, find those people in case something goes wrong, you need someone in a pinch to really help you out. That's, I guess, a huge concern for a lot of entrepreneurs, that you're not stuck to only certain people because they have certain skill sets. So you want to make it as easy as possible. So if I was just starting today, I would probably make my entire website based on WordPress. And customize around it. Again, we, you know, started before WordPress really became mainstream, so we built our own content management system from scratch, and I'm not going to scrap everything now just to go to WordPress, but if I was starting over from now, I'd probably look at WordPress very seriously instead of doing something ourselves and customize around it, because a lot of the cool, awesome tools have already been built around it. So hopefully that helps. That's my opinion. If you guys are watching the video and are liking it, please give it a thumbs up. It makes me want to do more of these videos for you guys. And I'd love to hear what you're using, if you have any extra feedback that you can offer here. And if you have a question, I'd also love to see it if you wanna leave it in the comments below. So thank you, and we'll see you on the next episode.
