My friends have asked me to help them build a website for our small school alumni (about 500 people) and I was wondering the best way to go about doing this.
They need to have an index of people, a way to make donations, a hosted newsletter, and a couple more simple things.<p>I'm a developer but obviously I don't want (or have the time) to build it from scratch, so I thought I would use Wordpress and some plugins. But I have a couple questions regarding this:<p><pre><code> - Can you do enough frontend design to make a Wordpress site not look like a Wordpress site at all?
- What's the flexibility of adding new features if I the frontend is redesigned?
- Is it a better idea to hire out and let someone else pick all the plugins and put it together?
- Can you give me a recommendation on would could build such a thing for me, or would it be cheaper to do myself?
- What would these things cost?
</code></pre>
Thanks!
>Can you do enough frontend design to make a Wordpress site not look like a Wordpress site at all?<p>Yes. One of wordpress' strengths is its theme system. You can find a number of existing themes which are ready to make 'child themes' out of (I suggest looking at Responsive or even 2012.)<p>Bear in mind there's nothing you can do to keep someone from viewing the source and seeing it's a wordpress site.<p>>What's the flexibility of adding new features if I the frontend is redesigned?<p>You have a functions.php to build whatever hooks you need into the API for that particular theme, and plugins are basically global applications which can do anything. The API can be a bit arcane but there's a very good chance whatever problem you have has already been covered in an existing theme or plugin. I would be willing to bet that for what you describe, 100% could be handled with existing plugins, and 90% of the rest by creating a child theme and tweaking. This is honestly what Wordpress was meant for.<p>>Is it a better idea to hire out and let someone else pick all the plugins and put it together?<p>I would say it depends on the amount of work you want done, in regards to customization of the theme and custom plugins.<p>>Can you give me a recommendation on would could build such a thing for me, or would it be cheaper to do myself?<p>You could do it yourself for free, but looking up documentation and solutions is on you. How comfortable are you with horrible looking mixin PHP?
Do yourself a favor though, whatever you do: look up "hardening wordpress", apply what you learn and turn off theme editing through the UI.
You use Wordpress because you like the off the shelf parts.<p>You can make WordPress look like anything. It is PHP, so if you want you can have a page that is mostly a web App and just use WordPress for the content blocks on the page, but that wouldn't be the most efficient way to do things.<p>If you have to ask if it would be easier, then it would probably be easier.<p>Paying for custom design varies wildly. You could spend $50 on a kid in college who may or may not make something awesome. You could spend $50k on a major design studio.<p>As an SEO I saw both happen.