Nonsense Data

[Aegean]

Hi folks,

I just thought I'd share something interesting that came about yesterday. I was contacted by one of my long-time customers, I look after their estate agent website.

He employed a new chap in his office that reckons he's a bit of a 'web guru' (to use his own words). Anyway he alerted my customer to a discrepancy in the stats I was providing and the stats as shown by one of his 'professional tools'. It turns out it was urlspy.co.uk - so I ran a check myself.

Incidentally, my customers site has been around for 10 years and is one of the busiest estate agent websites in Scotland. Here's the lowdown on what URL spy says:

Monthly pages viewed: 1,250 ------ its actually 300,000

Monthly Visitors: 1,400 -------- its really around 65,000

Inbound links: 29 ------- it's over 4,000

Number of pages: 68 ------- its around 1,400

Site Value: £600 ----------- the CMS alone was £8K, not including other work over years and years.

It just goes to show the utter rubbish that some of these so-called data sites display. But it gets worse - the young guy actually said to my customer he would build a new website using wordpress for my client and scrap the old one as it 'obviously wasn't working'. He was ready to replace one of the busiest sites in Scotland with a wordpress site. Bloody hell.

Luckily my client, who I've been working with for a long time, rang me and gave me the direct dial number for this young whippersnapper. I phoned him and within about 2 minutes he conceeded he didn't know WTF he was on about, and when I told him he nearly took down one of the busiest sites in Scotland he was very embarrassed.

However, and this I suppose is the moral of the story, I nearly had a situation where a 'bedroom web designer' who was employed by a customer of mine nearly ruined my customers web business, without a thought for consequences or whether he actually knew what he was doing.

Thank god my client has the foresight to ring me!

 

[monaghan]

I suspect there are lots of similar stories.

I built a very basic HTML site (clone of their brochure) for a charity, it was replaced a year or 2 later by a "web developer" with the office administrator trained in running it. This kept breaking and the guy eventually disappeared leaving me to hit the database each time she needed to apply an update. The web site had the team emails visible as mailto: links and the spam went up. I eventually got fed up with the constant maintenance and built a Joomla site for them with contact forms, scheduled publishing for regular notices so they could pop them in at the beginning of the term and forget about site maintenance, they didn't use it or update it and again got in a "web developer" who emigrated. This new site still has mailto links! I still get questions over why they get so much spam! I washed my hands with it as there's only so many times you can offer a freebie to have it trashed.

 

[BREWSTERS]

A little knowledge can be dangerous!

Hope he's now back to just being the office 'tea guru'.

 

[Silverz]

It's quite shocking, and unbelievable how easily people can destroy years of work due to sheer ignorance, and it goes to show that anyone searching for a web developer should really look into their past work in detail.

On a side note Aegean, although I understand this guy nearly replaced a perfectly established website, but do you have any reservations about using wordpress in general on 'bigger' sites. I guess what I'm asking is would you use wordpress for your 'golden' site, and if not what are your reasons...your opinion would be greatly appreciated

 

[monaghan]

I think it depends on the type of site, I'm sure you could shoehorn an estate agent into WP, but a bespoke site is always going to be technically better than a generic tool. The decision needs to be made on the cost benefit of a bespoke site, no point in having a technically perfect bespoke development that has cost thousands for a site that will only ever earn peanuts. If you want a blog or simple blog style site, then probably not worth having a bespoke system built unless it is is really something special.

Each site needs to be evaluated on it's merit, this is where a decent developer will be able to make a good call on platform used.

 

[Aegean]

On a side note Aegean, although I understand this guy nearly replaced a perfectly established website, but do you have any reservations about using wordpress in general on 'bigger' sites. I guess what I'm asking is would you use wordpress for your 'golden' site, and if not what are your reasons...your opinion would be greatly appreciated

Well I agree with Monohans post, it does depend on the situation. I don't have anything against wordpress, but generally speaking the code is messy, its very easily hacked and its not dependable. Wordpress was really designed as a basic blogging platform for folk who dont know how to build websites and who want automated sitewide link updating.

I use WP myself on some personal sites, but I strip the code right back so the minimum shows and optimise whats left. For clients, such as hie.co.uk (government agency), I would never use WP. For them I used a £20K CMS and programmed lots of add-ons. It really does depend on the customer but its the old story really - if you want to make money you've got to spend money, simple as that. You might get lucky with a 'successful' website based on a low cost solution, but the bottom line is that anyone I know of in the UK who makes serious money or high visitor sites has spent what it takes to make that happen.

As a last point, I don't like to see people using WP for 6 page websites. Not only is it not required, its bad policy and leads to a whole load of junk that doesn't need to be there. Unless theres going to be a lot of future content I'd stay away. Incidentally Google knows if WP is being used, it also knows a lot of other CMS systems, therefore it knows the investment a site has had, just like it knows standard-compliant, valid code.

 

[Blossom]

There is very little you can't do with WordPress. It scales pretty well and is in use by a lot of big companies - DreamHost.com is powered by WordPress, as is Mashable and The NY Times. It's hugely scalable if you've got the budget for hosting resources.

If you set up WordPress to be secure and you're sensible about what you install, there really shouldn't be security concerns. I agree that the code is messy and hacked together in places, but on the flip side it's extremely good for SEO and Google absolutely loves it.

As a last point, I don't like to see people using WP for 6 page websites. Not only is it not required, its bad policy and leads to a whole load of junk that doesn't need to be there. Unless theres going to be a lot of future content I'd stay away.

You must hate my site then

Incidentally Google knows if WP is being used, it also knows a lot of other CMS systems, therefore it knows the investment a site has had, just like it knows standard-compliant, valid code.

Google's own site doesn't validate so they can hardly criticise other people's. Investment is irrelevant as a direct measurement. Signals related to investment - for example, more, higher quality content, better attention to detail for code and SEO practices etc. etc. sure. But directly speaking, a paid CMS will give you the same results (if not worse, depending on the CMS in question).

The problems you highlight I believe are generally down to user error and what's done after site completion.

 

[Aegean]

I agree with some of what you say Blossom, but not all of it. I would never in a million years give wordpress to a business or corporate customer looking for a high end CMS solution, and frankly I don't know any professional developer that would. Essentially because its very limited and also for the reasons highlighted in my previous post.

As I say I do use it for some sites of my own, and yes its very handy. Incidentally the NY Times own part of the company that develops wordpress and it doesn't power the whole site, only the blogging parts of it.

 

[Silverz]

Thank you monaghan, Aegean and Blossom for your opinions.. it's greatly appreciated

I have personally noticed quite a few wordpress based websites that rank highly with google (some big names), but I also understand that perhaps for certain areas it might not be the best option, especially if you can afford to invest on a massive scale.

Unfortunately I can't afford that kind of investment, so based on how well some wordpress sites perform..and your opinions, I think wordpress is the best option for me.

 

[monaghan]

If you've done the evaluation and WP is the conclusion, excellent, if you use WP (or any other platform) because some bloke on a forum suggests it, then that's not so good.

It is all about getting the right balance of functionality, performance, cost and ease of use and only the person who can make that decision is you.

 

[Silverz]

Oh no, My decision would never be based entirely on what 'some bloke on a forum suggested', It has been something I've been looking into for quite some time now, so when I saw this thread, and read your post, I wanted to read opinions on why it wouldn't be a good idea to use wordpress, and nothing major has been brought up to steer me away from my decision. I like to not only do my own 'homework' on these types of decisions, but also like to read experienced peoples opinions on them too

 

[djbw]

I'm pretty sure phandroid.com runs on WordPress and they have a HUGE amount of traffic...

 

[peter_w]

There is nothing "limiting" about Wordpress if you know what you are doing. I would never advise a business to spend £20,000 on a premium solution if a custom Wordpress installation will do the same job for 10% of that.

 

[Aegean]

Well going back to my original post, replacing a successful and professional website with a blogging platform is simply crazy, and frankly anyone that'd do that doesn't know what they're doing. Like I said before, thank goodness my client rang me.

The point I guess I was trying to make is that here you have a bedroom web designer, who probably only knows how to install and use wordpress, and suddenly they're advising a business about doing business online. Unbelieveable.