More than ever before, I would recommend WordPress as your platform of choice for most website solutions. As we all know, new technologies are continually rendering old technologies obsolete. For several years there was a time when I was thinking Squarespace would put WordPress out of business. I was concerned about Squarespace’s popularity because, as a designer, Squarespace takes all the design choices out of the equation, making the work nothing but sliding boxes around on the screen. WordPress had the accurate reputation for being “complicated”, while Squarespace’s drag and drop builder was easy to use by even novice web users. It also did not help that WordPress is a prime target of attack from hackers due to it’s popularity.
In 2022 I saw a shift where WordPress’ beta visual editor was “catching up” to the ease of use that Squarespace provides. And, plugins like Wordfence were doing an excellent job warding off hackers, and technologies like Google’s recaptcha was stopping spam.
In 2023, I was confirmed that I had made the right choice continuing to double down on WordPress. Their new user interface and editor allows me to design anything, while still making it easy for me to had the maintenance over to clients if they choose to do the maintenance themselves. More often than not, I’ve found it to be better for me to continue maintaining the site, because most of my clients are too busy with their own business to add web maintenance to their montly tasks.
The new core of WordPress comes with a theme that can essentially replace most any other theme. Even though I feel badly for all the designers who made themes for WordPress anticipating this to be a never ending source of income, I was finding that this saturation of theme options was missing the point of design entirely. You don’t need thousands of design options to pick from, you need a designer who with a few key choices builds a design from the same provided “theme”. The 2023 theme does just that. I will be able to use this theme to build any design. It is essentially the scaffolding for a house, of a skeleton theme. I’ve built my 2023 redesign with this theme.
See how Schildbach Design can design your new site with this theme.