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haven't I seen that before?

  • photo credit: Collin Robinson

Building a website can cost people next to nothing these days. Development time can be reduced to minutes by using Wordpress, and design costs can be removed entirely with the use of free templates. Do all these free things come at a higher cost?

Wordpress, at its core, is a blogging application, but with all the plugins available it doesn’t surprise me that millions of people are using it for anything but a blog. Content sites, portfolio sites, even e-commerce sites can be run on Wordpress these days. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Being such a widely known, open source application means it is wide open to attacks. A custom developed application is less likely to come under such an attack as the results would be minimal in comparison.

As far as design is concerned, if you look at the retail market you would never see the look of two different stores match. Walmart doesn’t look like Target, and BestBuy doesn’t look like CircuitCity. PRSarahEvans doesn’t look like Focused2win, oh wait ... yes it does.  EsquirePhotography doesn’t look like KelbyCarr, hold on ... yes it does. (These two even have the same navigation layout issues.) While all four of these individuals are unique, their websites are not. I’d like to say web designs were like snowflakes, no two exactly alike, but that’s not always the case.

All four of these sites are run by unique individuals, but there is nothing unique about their site designs. Each one of those sites could be custom designed and developed to meet the specific requirements of the owners, but they have all decided to funnel their businesses through free quick systems. It reminds me of the project triangle. Out of fast, cheap, or good ... they all picked fast and cheap.

I want to make it perfectly clear that I absolutely respect the work of @prsarahevans, and @typeamom. I am just using their sites as examples. I can't say anything bad about @ShannonHerod, who runs focused2win, but as most of his tweets are spamtastic links about how he made 'a Massive $147 within 24 Hours Using Twitter' I can't say I respect him, but again his site is just an example.

  • photo credit: Collin Robinson

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