Discussion on:

Website Consulting

I'm redesigning our company's website and have received 2 quotes: 1) using Word Press as a platform 2) coding the web from scratch.

I'm not sure which is better and would like to hire a consultant to give me guidance. I want an unbiased consultant, so I do not want them to sell me a website. I just need their advice.

Would anyone have any recommendations for me?

Try re-posting in the Q&A
section.The 'Discussion' forum is for matters of general discussion, not specific problems in search of a solution. The 'Water Cooler' is for non-technical discussions. You can submit a question to 'Q&A' here:

http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/questions/post?tag=mantle_skin;content

There are TR members who specifically seek out problems in need of a solution. Although there is some overlap between the forums, you'll find more of those members in 'Q&A' than in 'Discussions' or 'Water Cooler'.

Be sure to use the voting buttons to provide your feedback. Voting a '+' does not necessarily mean that a given response contained the complete solution to your problem, but that it served to guide you toward it. This is intended to serve as an aid to those who may in the future have a problem similar to yours. If they have a ready source of reference available, perhaps won't need to repeat questions previously asked and answered. If a post did contain the solution to your problem, you can also close the question by marking the helpful post as "The Answer". .

A CMS-driven site like WordPress is MUCH cheaper and faster to deploy, as the amount of effort, testing, and of course coding time, is much much less. The possibility of errors and even security weaknesses is much less as well, if configured properly. The navigation and consistency of a CMS-driven site will be pretty much perfect. So simple a cave-man could do it.

The down side of a CMS-driven web site is that the overall design and navigation is constrained, so some of the real flashy 3D animation stuff is not going to be possible.

It's critical to choose the CORRECT CMS platform, as there are differences in the feature-set and ease of use. WordPress is all the rage right now, but there are some instances where Joomla might work better, or a closed-source solution like Ektron or SiteCore may work better in a corporate environment.

The other issue is if you have a very special requirement for some sort of eCommerce or enrollment system as your core website, then it either needs to be a purchased web application to do that, or written from scratch, as there are limits in terms of what exactly you can 'plug in' to a CMS-driven site.