Wordpress vs Standalone site

Hey people,

I’ve started taking on more clients than I have in the past and their demands that I would like to be able to handle are starting to include things a CMS is necessary for. Wordpress seems to be the most popular, although I know there are others.

My question for the community is this: When you build a site with CMS/WP in mind, do you go about your business normally (getting an HTML doc, CSS files, and your javascript going and build the site) or with WP does everyone just use themes? I dont want to have to use bs proprietary stuff if I can avoid it. What Im looking for is to add to my workflow not completely change it. I like using SASS and CSS/JS libraries and styling my sites with those languages, and I thought thats how the world made websites. Im just starting to dive into CMS to allow my clients to dynamically add content to their site (make posts).

I want to be able to go about building a site as usual and ADD the functionality of the CMS for the client and style the different elements of how a post would look to match the rest of the design and BAM! My original site but where my client can continue to make posts/pages as they see fit. I have no problem with themes for the posts but I dont get how anyone (unless they want it to be super easy/fast) would like having to go in and alter code someone else wrote and have a clunky theme with all this extra code that you wouldnt even know exists. (Think WYSISYG like Muse)

If Im way off base in terms of how people use WP, please educate me.

Thank you for any help in all of this!

My advice is not to just jump to using Wordpress every time, really you need to assess what the needs of the content and you client are before deciding what CMS to use. Try to have a few CMS’s in your arsenal to cover any sort of requirement, it’s worth looking at modern CMS’s such as Craft, Statamic and ExpressionEngine for certain sites…

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If you’re going to develop a WordPress site then yes, you need a template. It might be one of the standard themes or a bought one, or one you create yourself.

So can I code my own site and use wordpress and a theme for the blogging pages and functionality?

Yes. If you’re going to create your own them you need to do it within the parameters set down by Wordpress.

If you want your whole site to be powered by WordPress, you can still have it look the way you want instead of going with a ready-made theme.

In very simplistic terms, each content area of the website is replaced by the WordPress loop which pulls the content from the database based on specific parameters in the query geared towards that particular piece of content.

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