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So what is all the hub bub about WP? I haven’t authored anything for my company for years. For being free, WP requires more financial commitment to code and maintain sites. Themes should not require subscriptions. How absurd. Why are so many themes for a free platform deliberately written so users cannot take advantage of the software and must pay to use all the power the software has available?
Does your electrician charge you again and again for the lights he installed 3 years ago, just because they still work?
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Developers need to make money somehow!
And as a web designer who primarily works in word press, I think WordPress is the shit. There’s a reason that like 40% of all websites are WordPress.
There are a lot of free themes out there, or free versions of other themes. I like the free version of Neve, they add their own water mark to the footer, but you can easily hide that with a little css in the child theme. There are also many themes that you can pay a one time fee to use, such as Divi, which is a great option for those who don’t know css.
But the biggest and best thing about WordPress is that there are a plethora of free plugins that can be used to take your website to the next level, and the SEO tools in WP are astronomically superior to the ones I’ve seen in other web page builders.
Themes are dead. Right now with Elementor Pro and some other plugins, you can build anything you want really. You might need to pay for some on a yearly basis, but some Devs offer all-time packages. More expensive, but you can use them as much as you want.
Working with fullly fleshed out themes is basically unnecessary. You can make your own from a mostly blank slate – see starter themes – as you go. And for bespoke professional designs you pretty much have to do this. It’s not like the thing your graphic designer handed off is already in the stylesheet…
Many plugins can be omitted outright too. Look around the sub, half the things people are asking for a plug-in for are like things you can accomplish with 50 lines of vanilla JavaScript.
As a developer you have an easily extendable and relatively stable platform to build on, which has excellent and through documentation.
For the m non developer you have something you can build an “okay” site on, which is arguably better than what a non-dev could do on a platform like Drupal, or without a CMS at all.
I think it’s a little silly how people insist on WP when they do not actually need a CMS, but it is what it is. It’s fine. It’s annoying sometimes but it’s fine.
I don’t think your metaphor or analogy is right for this situation. Light bulbs and the electrical work in a building generally do not have programming, database, security, and other infrastructure updates and upgrades on a regular basis.
WordPress is open source and extremely extensible. There is no right path to achieve the goals and results.
You do not need to purchase a theme. Not at all. You could use the newer built-in WordPress themes and develop something completely bespoke to the business’s needs. That is, if you have the time, ambition, and capital to do so.
Additionally, WP is not the best CMS. Often times installations becoming over-engineered and bloated very quickly.
We now use wix, primary for security, yes there are some very nice wp themes, but wp is just a pain to manage, plug-ins constantly breaking your site, site gets hacked because of outdated plugins, we never have these issues with wix