WP Out of the Box vs. Customizations

WordPress out of the box is pretty basic as it should be.  Afterall, WordPress doesn’t know if your business needs to showcase hotel rooms, food recipes or menus, services or products, if you are just an online business or if you have a physical storefront with hours of operations…  Therefore, WordPress out of the box usually doesn’t work for the average business.  Now, if you need something simple and know how to format your content with the correct colors, fonts, spacing, image sizes…  Then you might be able to pull off a decent site with the WordPress basics.

For example, here is what you get with an out of the box WordPress installation for a basic page.

There really isn’t too much to it.  You can add a title a featured image and then you have an area to add content with a WYSIWYG editor that allows you to do some basic formatting.  If you are good at formatting content, then you might be able to make this work.  However, it will be more tedious and limiting.

At Confluence, part of our Discovery process is to listen to your needs and then design not only a pretty website, but also a solution that is flexible, scalable, and easier to use.  We don’t want our clients getting frustrated with trying to get things to align correctly with the right font color, size, and spacing.  Therefore, we build solutions where our clients simply enter the content and our behind the scenes code does the rest.

Here is an example of how we enhance WordPress for our clients.  Notice the additional custom fields, known as custom metaboxes, that allow a user to enter data into different fields and or enable or disable certain sections of the page.  This gives our clients a lot of extra flexibility with regards to how the present their products and or services.