We love WordPress. This post certainly isn’t a session of WordPress-bashing. We do believe however, that WordPress is not the best content management system (CMS) for the vast majority of schools and colleges. There are a few reasons so bear with.

Managing Your Website

For the vast majority of schools it is so important that there is a CMS in place that makes it incredibly easy for you to keep your content up to date. That’s because most schools don’t have a marketing professional or a web designer / developer in place. WordPress is big and it is powerful, but it can also be daunting for a lot of people.

When a company provides you with a WordPress school website they need to install a ‘theme’ (or a site design template) into WordPress to make it look how you want it to look. Whether they are designing it themselves or buying the theme (which will cost no more than $60), each installation will be unique unless they are using the same theme over and over again.

Because each installation is unique, there are different settings and functions specific to each theme which has a detrimental effect on the companies ability to support their clients, particularly as they grow and expand. This also has the potential to affect the price they have to charge because to sustain a good level of support they need lots of people with a broad range of knowledge = not cheap.

Options Not Tailored to Your Needs

Even if you have a marketing professional in place to manage your school or college website, another issue is that the plugins* that WordPress needs to make your school website function as a school website aren’t designed entirely with schools in mind. More often than not they are 3rd Party Plugins that need regular updating and are shoe-horned into the system to force it to do what it needs to.

That means you haven’t got something is specifically designed with you, as the end user, in mind.

Training Fun & Games

Because WordPress is a bit of a monster, training can be incredibly difficult to manage, disperse and sustain. Bear in mind again that there are plugins in any WordPress school website that may well be specific to you and because they’ll be installed on a server account specific to you, making sure you know how to use them, particularly when they’re updated is almost impossible to keep on top of.

Security Issues

This is the biggest concern of a growing number of schools and colleges when considering a new school website. WordPress is a great product but there is a compulsory requirement for the installation and all associated plugins to be kept right up to date, very regularly otherwise security weaknesses creep in. Not to scare monger but a report published in December 2014 stated that over 70% of WordPress installations were vulnerable to attack. Check your WordPress account now to make sure all your plugins are up to date and you’re using the very  latest version of WordPress.

The Alternative?

All of these are issues that cause more and more schools to think about looking elsewhere for their school website provision. These are some of the reasons that we built our own CMS, completely from the ground up to make sure that we offer the best school website content management system available for schools. We want to put the power in to your hands. We work to offer you a system that is just as powerful as WordPress, more so in many, many respects, but that is much easier to use for the vast majority of people. That’s why we offer dedicated training and support of our product that we built, in-house, specifically with schools and colleges in mind as the target and sole end user.

Even those people who are die-hard WordPress fans love using our CMS because it covers absolutely everything they need and so much more.

We would love to offer you no-obligation demonstration of our market leading Schudio School Website CMS to show you just what can be achieve. Drop us a line!

——————–

*A WordPress Plugin is a program, or a set of one or more functions that adds a specific set of features or services to the WordPress website.