WordPress is a website management framework used by millions and supported by hundreds of developers; we took our time evaluating the best options for clubs like yours and building upon a framework like WordPress was a no-brainer.

 

We pride ourselves as being part of the WordPress community by building all our club websites, and even our main website, using WordPress.

 

We evaluated a number of content management systems (and even started to build our own from scratch) before we finally came to the conclusion that, for clubs like yours, the WordPress framework was the best way forward.

Below are some of the reasons why we built the site in the way we did:

 

Advantages of WordPress

• Evolving: WordPress is constantly evolving with a team of hundreds of developers. It is impossible to keep apace with all the developments in blogging and the internet if you build your website yourself; you need a framework, and preferably one with a vibrant community.
• Thriving Community: The WordPress community is huge (and incredibly helpful). There is always someone on hand to answer questions and give advice on the framework; whether it is the team of developers who are constantly improving the framework or WordPress users, you get the sense that everyone is ‘in it together’ and will help out where they can.
• Powerful: WordPress uses a plugin architecture; practically anything you want to achieve with your website is possible with plugins. Some plugins are free, some are paid, but the huge number of plugins means that you can architect a website and bring together different items of functionality to produce a kick ass website.
• Ease of Use: Yes, there is a learning curve to mastering WordPress. At teamthing.com we try to minimize the amount of ‘Setting-up’ you need to do and try to let you concentrate on doing simple things like posting your latest news. WordPress is evolving and usability is one thing that will continue to improve; everyone who has a teamthing.com website (including the teamthing.com administrators) will benefit from these improvements.

 

 Did you know? 16% of all websites ran on WordPress in 2012. That’s an estimated 58,000,000 sites.

 

Disadvantages of WordPress

• Flexibility: Being a plugin architecture has its disadvantages; sometimes you have the feeling that the site has been ‘stitched’ together. At teamthing.com we only offer themes and plugins that ‘fit’ with each other and with the ethos of clubs like yours.   
• Ease of Use: There is a learning curve in mastering the WordPress dashboard but, for those who persevere, you will get to grips with it fairly quickly and soon discover the immense power that you unlock with a little bit of patience.

 

Alternatives

WordPress is not the only way to build a content driven website, several other CMS (content management system) exist.

• Drupal & Joomla: Joomla and Drupal are both amazing CMS systems with plenty of advocates and advantages. However, some systems are better suited to different scenarios; from what I have seen from Joomla and Drupal is that they are better suited for bigger, more complex websites. All the clubs on teamthing.com are small to medium sized entities that are looking for the ‘easy-to-use’ and ‘well supported’ qualities over the more bespoke abilities of a bigger system.
• Custom Website: You could develop your own website without using a framework. We have tried to build our own CMS from the ground up but, no matter how hard we tried, we could not keep up with all the changes happening in the internet realm e.g. responsive designs, html5 etc. 

 

Did you know? WordPress holds 53.8% of the market share for Content Management Systems (in 2012). That means over half of all website owners using a CMS have chosen WordPress. Joomla, the closest competitor to WordPress in terms of popularity, holds just 9.2% of the CMS market. Drupal sits in third place with 6.7%.

 

Ok, so WordPress is great, why don’t I just create a website using wordpress.com?

WordPress.com is great…….. up to a point.

Very quickly you will run into the limitations of WordPress.com and understand why opting for a self-hosted wordpress site like teamthing.com makes sense for your club.

• Custom Plugins: One of the biggest problems is that wordpress.com does not allow custom plugins. Yes, there are 1000’s of free plugins that you can use, but you will likely find another, custom, plugin that you just cannot use on your wordpress.com website. We could not provide much of the club specific functionality that we offer to clubs on teamthing.com if we hosted on wordpress.com 
• Custom Themes: As with custom plugins, there are restrictions on which themes you can use on a wordpress.com website. All the themes that we use on teamthing.com are specifically geared for use by clubs; you will quickly find that the free themes you find on wordpress.com are not fit for purpose or just lack those little extra features that will give your website that ‘wow’ effect.
• Fundraising: You can not monetize your wordpress.com site. teamthing.com gives you the freedom to monetize your site through your own click ads and club specific fundraising tools.  
• Cost: The cost is much the same as teamthing.com, you get basic functionality for free, and pay for a higher level of functionality and service. But, with teamthing.com, you get a more tailored solution, delivered to you and supported by people who are club admins, just like you.

 

Why don’t I just self host my own WordPress website?

So if wordpress.com is not flexible enough to cater for the specific functionality required by clubs, surely I can just get my own hosting account, domain and install WordPress on a self-hosted site?

Yes, absolutely, this will get around the limitations of a wordpress.com site, but it will be incredibly difficult to replicate all the pre-packaged functionality included in your teamthing.com site.

Hassle: To go down the self hosting route you must buy the (correct) hosting, set the hosting account up, provision the server, install WordPress, choose a theme, choose the correct plugins (that play nicely with your theme), think about security and performance, deal with the server going down, update plugins, update core etc etc etc. Even after you have done all this you will still may find that your theme does do do exactly what you need it to, or even look anywhere as good as it looked on the demo site that you bought it from.

Cost: Not counting the cost of your time in setting up and maintaining everything mentioned above, the cost of setting up the server, yearly fees etc will roughly be the same as what teamthing.com charge for their ‘Pro‘ account. This also does not take into account that you will need to pay for your theme and custom plugins to get anywhere close to the functionality that teamthing.com offers you out-of-the-box.

 

Conclusion

Building on a CMS framework is the right choice for us and we believe, without it, we would not have been able to bring you the complete solution that we have for clubs today.

We are extremely happy with our choice to opt for a framework like WordPress as it has allowed us to focus on delivering essential functionality, quicker, to clubs like yours.