---
title: Wordpress
date: 2020-04-21T05:00:00-04:00
author: Sean Smith
canonical_url: "https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-03/episode-2/wordpress/"
section: Podcast
---
<!\[CDATA\[YII-BLOCK-BODY-BEGIN\]\]>[Skip to main content](#main-content)Guest Gregory Hammond
Gregory helps businesses with their website, he primarily works with WordPress. Gregory is always open to new opportunities
[ ](https://twitter.com/gjdevweb)
Season 03 Episode 2 – Apr 21, 2020
44:31 [Show Notes](#show-notes)
## Wordpress
0:00
0:00
1.0x
0.75x1.0x1.25x1.5x2x
[](//dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/website101podcast.com/uploads/mp3/season-03/02-Wordpress-master.mp3)
In this episode Sean and Mike talk about WordPress with Gregory Hammond - plugins, security, themes and everything you want to know about WordPress
### Show Notes
What is WordPress, who owns it and what does open source mean? The difference between wordpress.org and wordpress.com
Do WordPress sites always get hacked? yes and no.
How to choose the best plugin out of the myriad options available
Pros and Cons of WordPress
## **Key Topics**
- Understanding what WordPress is and why it's popular (\[00:58\] - \[02:11\])
- Choosing a hosting service for your WordPress site (\[05:52\] - \[06:33\])
- Security measures for WordPress websites (\[08:17\] - \[09:51\])
- Finding and choosing the best plugins for your WordPress website (\[12:27\] - \[16:43\])
- The impact of plugins on site speed (\[21:28\] - \[23:36\])
- Theme builders and site builders in WordPress (\[23:53\] - \[31:14\])
- Getting help with a broken WordPress website (\[31:56\] - \[34:00\])
- Choosing the right CMS for your website (\[34:53\] - \[38:21\])
### Show Links
- [Hosted Wordpress (SAAS)](https://wordpress.com/)
- [Wordpress to download](https://wordpress.org/)
- [Digital Ocean](https://www.digitalocean.com/)
- [Laravel Forge](https://forge.laravel.com/)
- [Server Pilot](https://serverpilot.io/)
- [Web Hosting 101](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-02/episode-2/web-hosting-101/)
- [Why Website Maintenance is Important](https://caffeinecreations.ca/blog/why-website-maintenance-is-important/)
- [Word Fence](https://www.wordfence.com/)
- [The Dangers of Over Reliance on Plugins in Website Builds](https://caffeinecreations.ca/blog/the-dangers-of-over-reliance-on-plugins-in-website-builds/)
- [Gregory J Development](https://gjdev.ca/)
Powered Transcript Accuracy of transcript is dependant on AI technology.
**\[00:00\]** **Sean:** Hi, and welcome back to the website 101 podcast. I'm Sean Smith, your co-host. And with me, as always, is Mike Mella. Hey, Sean. How's it going? Pretty good, Mike. Glad to have you back. And today, we're going to be talking about the elephant in the website room. And that elephant is WordPress.
Powers over 30% of the internet. It's the first thing that anybody thinks about when they're looking into websites. Everybody knows WordPress.
And we have a WordPress expert with us, Gregory Hammond, and myself and Gregory, we met online doing a live chat, and he was talking about WordPress. I was talking about craft, and we were talking about best practices in general for websites. So Gregory, can you introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about what you do, where you're based?
**\[00:58\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** Sure, first of all, thank you guys for having me. It's an honor to be guest on this fine podcast. My name is Gloria. I've been doing WordPress now for how has it been five years? Yeah, it's been close to five years. I believe my business is grocery development. I help entrepreneurs and small businesses with the website, with more sheet of WordPress websites.
**\[01:22\]** **Sean:** Cool. Excellent. So five years, that's a pretty good length of time. So, just in case there are some users who don't know what WordPress is despite it being the elephant in the room, can you give us a little background about what it is and why it's
**\[01:43\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** the one that everybody knows? Sure, Sean. WordPress is a content management system, just like FAF, CMS, or any of those other big ones, but it's completely open source, meaning that it's run by the community, the community makes additions or makes subtractions or whatever it is. And it is completely free. You don't have to pay a dime for WordPress.
**\[02:07\]** **Sean:** All right, so Mike, did you have any questions about that?
**\[02:11\]** **Mike:** Yeah, so the funny thing about WordPress, it's not a funny thing, but the great thing is that even if you don't know anything about websites at all, there's a good chance you've heard about WordPress.
That's the real, that's pretty amazing for a CMS, right? I don't think any other CMS in the world can say that. There are people who, you know, if they're just starting a business or whatever, and they need a CMS, they have heard of WordPress, even if they've never even gotten onto the web yet at all. So that's pretty impressive, that it has that kind of status in the industry.
So you mentioned that it's open source, and everyone contributes to it. Who owns WordPress? Because there's a WordPress.org and a WordPress.com.
**\[02:59\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** What's the difference there? The difference between the.com and.org is that.com is run and paid for by the company which offers first-create WordPress, which is automated, I think that's how it's pronounced. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
That sounds good to me. Wordpress.org is Wordpress.com from the game version and then it's completely open source, meaning anybody can contribute anybody can do additions or anything like that. But it has its own servers where you have to run it on your own.com has its own servers so that you pay them to basically run your Wordpress website.
much more limited compared from dot com to dot org, dot org you can do based on anything dot com is very limited in what you can do, but there's pros and cons to both depending on what you want and what you want to pay you.
**\[03:55\]** **Mike:** Okay, so dot, so you go ahead, you go ahead, so it sounds to me like WordPress dot com is
**\[04:04\]** **Sean:** similar to something like Wix or Squarespace where it's a software as a surface and WordPress or is I download the files and I do what I want with it? Is that correct?
**\[04:14\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** Yes, but with the dot walk, you don't even have to necessarily download it. There were some companies that offer what are called one click WordPress installers. I mean you buy the host and service from them, and then you just say I'm a WordPress, and then it says, okay, what user and password do you want? Okay, and then it automatically installs WordPress, and that's everything that's for you behind the scenes. So the
**\[04:35\]** **Sean:** All you have through the wizard for you.
**\[04:37\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** Exactly. All you have to do is log in.
**\[04:39\]** **Mike:** Yeah, a lot of people who are audience, if they've dealt with a hosting environment, where they're going through a C panel or one of these kind of tools that let you set up your email accounts and things like that. Yeah, you often see just a WordPress button that lets you kind of get up and running just like that without any installing anything yourself or whatever.
**\[05:03\]** **Sean:** It's pretty slick. Actually, coincidentally, more advanced hosting options using digital ocean and server pilot or Laravel Forge also have one click installs, which I was surprised to see. I use both Forge and server pilot with digital ocean when I'm hosting my clients. But I don't do the WordPress stuff. But I did see that the option exists there. So Gregory, I want to run my own WordPress website? What is the best company to host my website with? In your opinion, like, do you provide hosting for yourself as a for your clients as a reseller? And if not, where do you send your clients?
**\[05:52\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** Send something like that. That's a great question because there is no best company. The best company is the one that works for you. Now, of course, certain companies. We all know you should avoid GD and a couple other companies are not going to publicly name but again they might have great employees but they won't. I'm the best WordPress hosting. I lease out WordPress hosting but that doesn't mean you can't go with somebody else depending on who you choose. The one place I would stay away from is on WordPress.org. There is a hosting page. Stay away from most of the companies listed on that page because they pay to show up on that page.
**\[06:33\]** **Sean:** Ah, interesting. Yeah, I would also like to plug an episode from season one where we talked about website hosting. So I'm going to include that in the show notes and also add in, avoid any hosts that are owned by EIG. Check the show notes. Yes. Check the show notes for the hosting episode. EIG is an evil evil evil company. I speak from experience. Yeah, absolutely absolutely. They are completely evil again
**\[07:05\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** Don't play it might be good, but they're so as they provide basically what happens is a company gets bought by them Yeah, and then you are there so it turned out to be S I'm not gonna spawn the show, but it turned out to be S. Yeah, that happened to me
**\[07:20\]** **Mike:** So my one of my clients was on a great host a Canadian host actually that was doing great for us and everything was going just fine. And then they got bought up by EIG and the service went so far down we had to move to a new host altogether.
**\[07:36\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** I think I know it's a company you're talking about too, but I'm not going to mention it in the name because it's a bad company. Let's just say there's a food name in it, I think, is that correct?
**\[07:45\]** **Sean:** Yeah, that sounds like the one, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I was with an American host for about eight years and then they got bought out by EIG And that's when I started learning about digital ocean and running my own servers, so that's what I do now.
**\[08:03\]** **Mike:** So, Gregory, speaking of quality assurance and that kind of thing with regard to hosting WordPress site, I heard that WordPress sites are always getting hacked. Is that true?
**\[08:17\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** Yes and no, it is true they are constantly in hacked, but it's because 30% of the world's website run on WordPress which makes it an easy target so yeah it's the same reason
**\[08:30\]** **Sean:** that Windows gets more viruses than Mac because it's more popular right exactly so what
**\[08:34\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** do you do you're probably going to ask next question so what do you do I would like
**\[08:37\]** **Mike:** to know what you do yep the best the best thing the best thing it do is two things one
**\[08:42\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** gets some sort of plug-in for your website like word fans or something like that that runs on your website so that you don't have to worry about it and also create backups maintain your website, keep everything updated. If somebody says, oh, you need update your website, then please go on and update it. Don't say, I'll do it later. I'll pay somebody I'll do it. Yes, you can pay people to do it, or you can do it yourself. It depends on which you want to, what you have to budget for and what you have to time for. Take ownership of your site, right?
**\[09:17\]** **Sean:** or pay somebody to do it. So I have a couple of comments about that. So keep your website updated. Very important. Quincidentally, a couple of weeks ago, I wrote a blog article why website maintenance is important. I'll link to it in the show notes. And we've got an upcoming episode with another guest. We're going to talk about the same thing. I saw her post on LinkedIn on the same topic. So that's an upcoming topic probably near the end of season three.
**\[09:51\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** Again, all the stuff that I mentioned or shunments and to anybody else mentioned on the show, we are not being paid to say any of this, okay? This is all completely, we're not getting paid.
**\[10:02\]** **Mike:** I'm not getting paid at all. I want to be clear about that. If someone wants to pay me, I'll get,
**\[10:07\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** I'm paying to run this thing. Exactly. None of us are being paid to mention anything. So we mentioned anything by name it's because we're not being paid to do so or if we're a warrior name it's
**\[10:19\]** **Sean:** because we don't want you to find out about that name. Hey um so can you tell me more about the word fence plugin? I've heard about it before but as I mentioned previously I'm not a wordpress fan so I don't really know in detail what exactly does it do for you and how easy is it to configure?
**\[10:37\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** So word fence is a plugin so most people know about a plugin for crafts.
You mess with me think that It's an addition to your website, and it all runs behind the scenes, so it takes care of security, it takes care of. I get with the emails from them saying, okay, you had 200 people who tried to log into your website, or you had these virus change reasons there, and then it takes care of that for me.
I don't have to worry about, oh no, if somebody trying to get into my website, oh no, if somebody trying to find a certain directory and basically crack and hack into my website, it takes care of all of that.
Again, it's not perfect, but it's better than nothing.
**\[11:13\]** **Mike:** And these, so plugins will probably get into this in more depth shortly here, but plugins in general there's obviously a big plugin ecosystem with WordPress because that's the whole sort of ideas that you can add on to the functionality and all that. WordFence, is this free? There's that cost
**\[11:29\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** money. There's a free version and there's a paid version. You start with the difference. What's the The difference between it is you start with the free version and then if you pay for it, you get security updates, you know. So if word friends, no word friends, monitor security industry and keep track of that and then if they notice somebody who's really trying to get into WordPress websites, they'll plug the premium customers first and then if you have the free version, you get those updates 30 days later.
**\[11:58\]** **Mike:** 30 days later.
**\[11:59\]** **Sean:** 30 days later. 30 days later.
**\[12:01\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** Oh wow.
**\[12:02\]** **Sean:** Oh wow. I do not like the idea of having to wait 30 days.
**\[12:07\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** Again, it's a con. Do you want to pay for it? What do you want to have the free version? I do the free version because I don't have to, because I don't need that right now. But if you want to pay for that, you can. But as always, make sure to take backups of your websites.
**\[12:26\]** **Sean:** Right, right. So some of your clients might need that. Let's stay on this topic about plugins. So can you tell me more about WordPress plugins in general? How do they affect your website? Is there such a thing as too many plugins?
**\[12:44\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** So plugins?
**\[12:45\]** **Sean:** I have an article about as well.
**\[12:46\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** So plugins are what is behind the scenes in your website. You install it and then it does whatever it says it does. Again, they're in the various plugins, but you have to keep that in mind and you have to do sort of your due diligence as we would always say. But plugins are anything behind the scenes. You can do word fence, you can do, oh, I'm blanking on stuff right now, but you can do almost whatever you want behind.
**\[13:13\]** **Sean:** I can SEO plugins.
**\[13:14\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** Yeah, SEO plugins, exactly. Oh, there's many other options depending on what you want. But as some, as you may have heard of, WordPress recently changed with WordPress 5.0 to what's called Gutenberg, which is in the site a lot of people hate it, but if you start a plugin, you can go back to the old version. You'll still be on WordPress 5, but you would edit the site using the old version.
**\[13:40\]** **Sean:** Right, so for listeners, I have an article where I talk about over-reliance on plugins, and there's a lot of risk with using too many plugins or choosing the wrong plugins, I'll link to that. And I'm going to actually ask Gregory to address plugins in general a little bit further. In WordPress, let's say I want to use a plugin that's going to do ABC, like some feature that is not part of the base install. And I searched the plugin, is it called a store or a...
**\[14:21\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** There are many ways you could find a plugin. The one of the best options is to go into your dashboard and then go through the plugin session and you could search in there.
**\[14:31\]** **Sean:** That's the right inside the CMS.
**\[14:33\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** That's searches the WordPress store. Those are all checked by the team behind WordPress and by volunteers to make sure they're actually good plugins and that they actually don't try drivers certain safety features. But you can also.
**\[14:50\]** **Sean:** So they're all vetted plugins. All right, that's good to know. I didn't know that. Let's say I go in and I'm searching for a plugin that is going to do XYZ function. Maybe it's SEO, maybe it's like going to add some new editor capabilities or hook into an API that I need to connect to.
And I find seven different plugins, which, as I understand it, is not uncommon with WordPress that there's multiple plugins. How do I choose the best one?
And one that is going to be supported, and one that is not the plug-in developer is not going to disappear into vapor two years from now.
And then my site is locked on an old insecure version of the CMS, because I can't update the play.
**\[15:36\]** **Mike:** You sound like you're describing an exact situation that happens to you. Is that what happened there? And then the guy, he did this other thing.
**\[15:43\]** **Sean:** No, I've seen this not with WordPress, but with other CMSs where I chose a plug-in or I've acquired a website that had a plug-in, it's no longer developed and I can't actually update the website anymore because of that. So basically, what kind of advice could you give to do it yourself or to properly vet and choose a plug-in that is more likely to stay around for the long term.
**\[16:18\]** **Mike:** Hi, hope you're enjoying this episode. We're always looking for topic suggestions from listeners, so if there's anything you like us to discuss in the future, please let us know.
**\[16:27\]** **Sean:** We're also looking for guests. If you know somebody who would make a great guest, if you think you would be a good guest, please let us know. You can reach out to us at website 101podcast.com slash contact.
**\[16:43\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** The best thing I would do, there are two major things you would do. Look at reviews. Look at reviews on your first show.
If it's from your first show store, which are all free, by the way, then look and see what reviews are.
If the majority of them are one, two, even three star reviews, then I would stay away from them.
So when the plugin was last updated, on the WordPress store, you can actually see when it asks that date it was updated.
So you can go in and see, okay, what's up date, a week ago, three days ago, two months ago. And if it's moved up, if it was last update, a week ago, WordPress actually displays a banner on the plugin's page saying, hey, this plugin has been developing for three years. This might not be compatible with the current version of WordPress, this is done. you can start at one of this.
**\[17:31\]** **Mike:** Cool.
**\[17:32\]** **Sean:** I see. Oh, I like the fact that they give a little bit of a warning. Again, as somebody who doesn't use WordPress, I'm unaware of these little things. So I like to hear that.
**\[17:42\]** **Mike:** You know, I've had something else I wanted to point out about plugins with WordPress.
Whenever I've had some experience using WordPress, and one of the things that impresses me with that is that a lot of plugins add functionality to the front end of your website as well.
So like once I had an example where I had to add a store locator where you kind of plot your stores on a map and they can sort of click on the pins and gives you the address or whatever. And it was running on WordPress and I was able to install a mapping plugin that lets me put all these offices one by one in there like just one after another.
I had that up and running in, it must have been 30 minutes where it would have taken me Probably days to develop that myself on another CMS.
**\[18:27\]** **Sean:** Approximately two and a half days.
**\[18:29\]** **Mike:** There you go.
**\[18:30\]** **Sean:** Thank you, Sean. Good luck to experience. Speaking from experience, I've done it on three or four sites. The first time took a long time after that, I can crib code from the other site. Right, so that's pretty cool.
**\[18:40\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** The thing is, you tend to rely more on plugins than you do on other platforms.
**\[18:45\]** **Mike:** Right.
**\[18:46\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** But again, there's no such thing as the number of, if you say too many, I'm going to do an air quotes So, too many, it depends on how many you want and what your host and platform can handle.
**\[18:59\]** **Mike:** Right.
**\[19:00\]** **Sean:** Okay. Yeah. Okay. That's a good point. I prefer to use as few plugins as possible, like to stick with the core, but every website needs to use some.
**\[19:12\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** And WordPress tends to lie more plugins, because SEO, Unicep or plugin, secure the Unicep plug-in, all sorts of things you need separate plug-ins for. But you can't just say, okay, I'm gonna make this into what press install by itself, you
**\[19:27\]** **Sean:** actually have to install the plug-in. Right, and for the listeners, that's actually part of the reason myself and Mike prefer CMS like craft CMS or stutomic because you can do a lot more out of the box. Yeah, although we still
**\[19:45\]** **Mike:** plug-ins and the drawback from the other side would be it takes a lot more development to do to set those CMSs up versus WordPress where you can literally click a button and it's up and running in a few hours. 30 minutes for
**\[19:58\]** **Sean:** your store locator versus two and a half days but the two and a half days gets you a lot of bespoke custom options whereas with a plug-in assuming the plug-in does what you want, you're good. But if you need something the plugin doesn't do, then you're also going to be diving into custom code. And something about those seven plugins is sometimes
**\[20:23\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** there might be seven different plugins as you said Sean. But also you sometimes have to find what the best one is for you. You might always say they do the same thing, but they might do things slightly differently. So look upon the WordPress official views, but also Google the plugin, put the plugin name in the WordPress at the end of it and see what people say about it. is you made to see about stuff on your own website about it.
**\[20:46\]** **Sean:** Right. Okay. I'd also like to talk one more thing about plugins before we move on, unless Mike has something else plugin related. No. As I understand it, every plugin that you install that does something on the front end adds its own CSS and its own JavaScript file, which can, well, Well, not can, will negatively impact your site speed, and as we all know, site speed is a big factor with Google SEO. What do you think about that? Is there a way to address the implications of all this added overhead?
**\[21:28\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** Most plugins don't, some plugins add CSS and JavaScript in your own specific thing if you add it to a page. page. So if you add that plug-in in a specific area on page, then it adds on CSS and JavaScript as you would say, but it does not change over all sites. Because if it changes the over all sites, then it will get more negative reviews and positive reviews. But it's saying,
**\[21:54\]** **Sean:** oh, it's taken over my entire website. So these files are only added on pages that that plugin is needed. Yeah. All right.
**\[22:04\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** That makes sense. That's cool. So for example, if you have a store, wood commerce is a popular store plugin for WordPress. And if you added to your website, it only adds that CSS and JavaScript to its own pages.
**\[22:16\]** **Mike:** Nice. All right. Now you can add that to that.
**\[22:19\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** You can add that to other pages, but again, you need to know the code to copy. You need to know how to actually change yourself. Again, do that at own risk or hire somebody who knows how to do that. don't do yourself unless you are willing to spend a lot of time and you'd like to
**\[22:36\]** **Mike:** code try and do that yourself. And you may not need that anyway, you may be better off with it just on the one page where it's required, right? Exactly, exactly. And there was some
**\[22:45\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** plug-ins that I don't even do any styling at all.
I have a contact form that does very little if no styling.
I have to do the styling myself, but it takes the styling right that I've from what I've already said within WordPress, you can set it on the font and everything.
It's like that. That's always in the theme which we should catch on.
But it takes it from there. So you don't have to worry about trying to, oh, what does it look like? It's going to take it directly from where it's from what's already been given. It'll inherit the site's existing styles and things like that.
Yeah. Exactly. Or take from what the site already has. Right.
**\[23:30\]** **Sean:** So. Okay. Yeah. So that one sounds more developer oriented. Yeah. Whereas a DIY guy is going to
**\[23:35\]** **Mike:** want some styles include. Hmm. Okay. All right. So you touched on a second ago. Let's let's take a step back and and look at that themes. The other thing that WordPress is really known for its themes. Tell us briefly what what is a theme and well let's just start there. What is a theme?
**\[23:53\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** the theme is to look and feel of a website. So any time you can see something that's a theme, but it also allows you, some themes are very popular, some themes are free, some are paid, some are very expensive, but it all depends on what you want to pay for a theme and what you think looks good. There's one friend actually who was on the podcast in season one, I think it was, Vinden Johnson, who has a theme, and I think he paid 150 bucks for it or some expensive like that, but you can also get some of my sites, my business site, which will be in the show notes, has a theme that
**\[24:32\]** **Sean:** has cost me nothing. Okay, all right, so related to themes, there are theme builder themes, also called site builders. Is this something that you're familiar with or something that you would recommend to a DIY guy or would you recommend it only for somebody who's more involved in the
**\[24:58\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** industry as a profession? A site building on WordPress has changed over time. It used to be you almost needed a site builder if you wanted a good looking site but nowadays not necessarily with WordPress file which is known as Gunberg, you can have a lot of stuff and you can add and change but the site builders allow you to do a lot a lot more. Right, so do you use the site builder
**\[25:24\]** **Sean:** yourself or are you going in and coding the theme and back to the site builder as well? Is there a particular site builder that you would recommend for a DIY person?
**\[25:36\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** The page builder, I would recommend for the DIY is called Elementora,
I'm going to try and find that right now without being a show notes, that is completely free, but there are so many other page builders to find them and just use what works for you, because what I use may not work directly for you, but you may also want more customization, you may want this, you may want that, it doesn't provide.
And some pageboards are very loaded, as in it takes up a lot of resources on your websites and some take up very little.
So it depends on how much you want to get free or get paid in loaded and how much you want to pay.
**\[26:22\]** **Sean:** Yes. Is there a way to know which theme builders are going to take up more resources?
**\[26:29\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** Sometimes they say running a home page. the homepage sometimes would say like very light on resources, or they say, oh, this provides a lot of customization. And sometimes it's just when the view is, okay, I have to
**\[26:44\]** **Mike:** say I am currently, we didn't talk about this before the show, but I am building a site for a client right now. And she wants it to be on WordPress.
It's actually a redesign of her current WordPress site, which I built several years ago, but I didn't really know much about WordPress, I was learning opportunity, whatever. Anyway, we're upgrading it, and she's decided to go with Divi, which is one of these site builder page builder type ones.
So just for our listeners to elaborate on this, you install the Divi, I guess, theme, and then inside that, you can choose themes sort of inside it. Like, you have a whole lot of other options about what you want each page to look like.
So the clothing that your website is going to be wearing, you have access to an entire wardrobe, you might say.
**\[27:36\]** **Sean:** So Mike, do you mean there's an option for a full page in a sidebar or a page with a hero and then a slider and maybe a model or a pop-up? So you just click that and then that particular entry or page is designed like this thing?
**\[27:56\]** **Mike:** Yeah, in fact, so when I, in the example, in the, when I was toying around with it today, it was just today that I started with it, you could open a page at your site, let's say the about page, click apply template, or whatever I don't know how it's labeled, and it would give you this little pop up that shows all kinds of about pages that they have designed, or people have designed and included in their platform, and you can just scroll through them all and say, oh, I like the look of that about page, and you click on it, and boom, all of a sudden, your about page looks like that. You may need to massage the content a little because it's not going to be smart enough to know where all your stuff goes necessarily but it's it's pretty slick and I got to be honest it was very very user friendly to customize and all that kind of thing. Again you can customize them
**\[28:41\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** quite quite easily as you said you can just install one of them and then just okay say hey I like that and then change it as you see for it a lot of them allow you drag and drop literally or hey click I want to upload an image drag the the image right here and you don't have to worry about don't code, you don't have to worry about trying to figure out how to maneuver exactly how you want them.
**\[29:03\]** **Mike:** Yeah, and changing gradients and colors, and like it was very user-friendly so far, so I am a little concerned, so you mentioned earlier, about some are more bloated than others and may add all kinds of code that is maybe only necessary because they're giving you so much control. So I'm anxious to see what it's gonna end up with at the end code-wise, but in terms of user-friendly and that kind of thing, it was great so far. And it's also very, it's just really beautiful. Like the templates they provide are really well designed,
**\[29:34\]** **Sean:** visually. All right, cool. I have a question related to Divi and I guess by extension to other theme builder themes. So you've got a section. It could be your blog or your services section on your website. And you've set up your Divi theme or look for that particular section. If I had one page or one entry inside of that section, can I give it a different look?
**\[30:03\]** **Mike:** Or is it as far as I know you can? I'm not an expert, Gregory, maybe you can confirm, but I think so. Because if you can, that's really cool.
**\[30:12\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** It depends on the page bill too. Some might not allow you to, but some might also allow you to. I've used Divi is a very popular one and it isn't, you don't have to pay for it. But I have used before, and it does allow you a lot of control. But again, it's sometimes overwhelmed with a DIYer in terms of actually installing, and they're going, whoa, I have 400 options to play with.
**\[30:37\]** **Mike:** That's right. Yeah, you have to be someone who wants to kind of get your hands dirty and toy around, not necessarily in code, because you won't need to do that. But yeah, if you want to actually change things at a granular level, that might be for you. but yeah, if you just want your site to look good, you're probably better off just go and find a theme that you like to look up and install that one theme, and then boom.
**\[30:59\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** Or you can install a theme in the page builder too. That's why I do it for a lot of my clients, is I install a basic theme that allows me to do what I want. And then I allow a do a page builder so they can customize a site for them.
**\[31:13\]** **Mike:** Interesting, interesting.
**\[31:14\]** **Sean:** All right, cool. So I've been working on my website, my WordPress website, and I'm stuck or something is broken. How do I get help with my WordPress website? I remember looking at WordPress support several years ago and it was like $10,000 for a year or something. And I looked a couple of months ago and I couldn't find that link anymore. So I don't know if there's still official support is really exorbitant. If you know how much is the official support right now And if I don't have this really expensive option, as I don't have that much money, how do I get good support?
**\[31:56\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** That's actually funny, Sean. I had that list as one of my questions that I was gonna bring up, tell you about it, you probably already have. But as I know, there is no official support. It's a company that will officially support the website, that's support for WordPress.com.
So they do support, they do the support for that. So you need support for your own stuff. And then you have to go, okay, what is the plan that you're having? Are you having a promise with a theme?
Are you having a promise with a particular plugin? We have a promise with WordPress itself. There's help sections for each individual within and each individual one. So you have a promise with, let's say, your page builder, then you go to your page builder support and contact them and say, okay guys, I need help.
Here's what theme I'm currently using. Here's what plugins I haven't installed. who are hosting with it and here's what it kind of looks like and here's what I'm trying to do and they use a lot of variables. Yeah, oh yeah because every single thing you change and add can be I think I read there's over a hundred thousand different plugins on the WordPress store itself.
So you can see you really have to when you when you ask for support you really have to list everything and if you don't know how to do that, then the support people can't help you. If you're using something on WordPress Store, then you have to go through forms and say, hey okay guys, I'm having trouble with this particular thing. Why is this area shown up? Sometimes there used to be WordPress called the white screen of death.
That's I'm going to just show it up as if you Google WordPress white screen death. You'll find it quite easily, but it was basically the WordPress side stockbook and it gave a really weird error or just stop working entirely. But now WordPress has fixed that so that email is you and it tries to get your website back up, but it all depends on where you need help. If you need help just in general and you don't want to go through a form, there are companies which provide WordPress support.
You can Google WordPress support company and find almost any company. There's many companies
**\[34:00\]** **Sean:** that can help you. So if you're having trouble getting community help or finding with Google, then you could find a company that you could pay however much per hour or per task. I'm stuck on this, okay, it's $100 or it's $50 or it's $500, whatever it's going to-
**\[34:19\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** What's 30 bucks a month? You could pay something like 30 bucks a month.
**\[34:23\]** **Sean:** Oh, there's services that will do maintenance for $30 a month. Oh, interesting. Is there any sort of official or very popular support forums or places that we can include in the show notes, like a couple of links that you would recommend.
**\[34:37\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** That's really honest for you, it's the WordPress store forum for that particular theme or plugin.
**\[34:44\]** **Mike:** So Gregory, we should ask this up front, I suppose, but do you, what other, do you use any other CMSes aside from WordPress when you develop your websites?
**\[34:53\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** Currently, I don't, currently I specialize in WordPress because that is what I've done for many years and it's what I know how to do. I have done other CMS's Shopify works, Webly, Squarespace, and even what you would call DRAV. Some of the time, that's what it may have heard about that.
**\[35:12\]** **Sean:** I've never heard about DRAV.
**\[35:13\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** Yeah, so I've used all of them at one point or another, but I decided WordPress was just one that I wanted to use and help my clients with because most people use, at least in my physical area used.
**\[35:28\]** **Mike:** Right.
**\[35:29\]** **Sean:** Okay, is there a particular reason that you chose WordPress when you started out? Oh, I see it.
**\[35:35\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** Is it? Yeah, just because I got hooked on it. I said, okay, what am I going to do? Oh, let's try WordPress. And then I installed it and went, oh, this is a fairly easy. Oh, that's easy to find some of this stuff. Oh, if I need help, I go here or I do that. Okay, let's do a WordPress. Let's help with WordPress.
**\[35:55\]** **Mike:** That's great. All right, so let me ask you this. What situation would WordPress be the wrong choice of CMS to use?
**\[36:08\]** **Sean:** Yeah, when would you recommend a client or a potential client comes to you and says, like, I need a new website or I want you to rebuild my website? Here's the spec. And then you look at them and go, you know what? WordPress is not the right thing. recommend that you go and talk to Sean and Mike or somebody else who uses a different CMS that you think would better suit the job. I'm just saying Sean Mike because we focus on something that's not good. And it could be, honestly, it
**\[36:39\]** **Mike:** could be that you don't think it's ever not the right choice. I don't know. I
**\[36:42\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** and if you don't know how to do that, then the support people can't help you. If you're using something on WordPress Store, then you have to go through forms and say, hey okay guys, I'm having trouble with this particular thing. Why is this area shown up? Sometimes there used to be WordPress called the white screen of death. That's I'm going to just show it up as if you Google WordPress white screen death. You'll find it quite easily, but it was basically the WordPress side stockbook and it gave a really weird error or just stop working entirely. But now WordPress has fixed that so that email is you and it tries to get your website back up, but it all depends on where you need help.
If you need help just in general and you don't want to go through a form, there are companies which provide WordPress support. You can Google WordPress support company and find almost any company. There's many companies
**\[37:31\]** **Sean:** Right, in that case, it sounds like sometimes the client just doesn't like the user experience of WordPress, which they need to find something else. It could be craft, it could be droop all, it could be whatever CMS is, just something that works better for them as a user experience.
**\[37:49\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** Yeah, exactly. Or they want to support some some CMS like Shopify or works who Webly provide easy access supports with Webpress.
**\[37:58\]** **Sean:** You really have to do a little bit more dig in now, but yeah, I think that the software is the services like Wix and weably and WordPress or a score space that you mentioned. If you need support, those are places that you're definitely going to get support because you're paying them every month. And that's part of their option is it's easy to use. And we will help you.
**\[38:21\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** Exactly, but it's also like you also pay for that. And you don't get as much customization. With WordPress, you can customize this almost a lot of stuff. You don't want it to seem, change out the theme, and keep your content where it is. If you don't like some plug-in or plug-ins to give you an URL, all you even want to say to accept bookworms on your website, there's many different book and plug-ins
**\[38:43\]** **Sean:** you can install. Right. So just to jump back a little bit, so Gregory said that one of the things that might reason that WordPress might not be the right site is that it needs a super customization or ability to edit everything so like a truly bespoke site. Conversely, I sometimes turn away a client because of the budget. So like my sites, the starting price is a lot higher than what you can get a WordPress site for. And if they don't have the budget, I will send them to somebody that does WordPress or Wix or Squarespace or something like that.
**\[39:29\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** Yeah, absolutely. Sorry. My God. But I, yeah, absolutely. I've had clients that I've had to turn away because they don't have either A, unrealistic expectations or B, they don't have the budget for it.
**\[39:43\]** **Mike:** Yeah, there's always a trade-off, right? Like, you might want to be able to control every aspect of your website, but are you ready to pay for someone to set up your website in such a way that allows you to do that? Maybe not. Maybe you don't have the budget for that. So you have to ask yourself, well, you know, do I want to save my money or do I want do I want to have control?
**\[40:01\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** And again, it's not necessarily save money. It's putting your money in a different way. Yeah, but you might say, okay, I want to pay the money for support, but I'm weren't to pay you for something like Shopify or something else that I can get to support
**\[40:15\]** **Sean:** easily. Right. Right. And even though I'm I use like craft and I build really bespoke sites, I don't give 100% control to most of my client sites.
They put the money into other things like some things that just are unlikely to change. It's better just to hard code that in. And if they need to change six months or a year later, they email me five minutes of work. It fits into their maintenance plan and boom, don't write.
Okay. So we spent a lot of time talking about WordPress and all that it does for people. What are the advantages of WordPress, which we've kind of hit on and the disadvantages. So the pros and cons, and If you can kind of try to address it specifically for a DIY guy rather than a developer, that would
**\[41:09\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** be great. So, foe is get much more options with WordPress if you don't like the homecoming, you can go with a different homecoming, if you don't like a theme, you can do a different theme, don't like any of the plugins, you can change any of those, but it also, it really, but the The content of that is there's so many options so that there's hundreds and hundreds of thousands of options, so you have to go, okay, do I want all those options, do I want to just pick something and go with it, but there's also many other options depending on the person, the DIY or depending on what you're willing to do and what customization you want to have and as well as what you want to pay.
**\[41:51\]** **Mike:** Yeah, so the community is almost like a blessing and a curse, right? Because you have this, it's powering most of the internet. It's been around for, I don't know what, 10 years or more, I don't know, whatever it was. And so it's probably closer to 15.
**\[42:06\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** Yeah, I'd say close to 15, but I'm not, I'm not actually sure, don't quote me on that.
**\[42:10\]** **Mike:** Yeah, I'm going to cook a little, but, but the other side of that, yeah, is you can kind to get lost in that sea of, you know, WordPress advice and plug-ins and whatnot.
**\[42:23\]** **Sean:** Yeah. Fifteen years. No kidding. Press came out May 27th, 2003. Oh. Way to go WordPress.
**\[42:31\]** **Mike:** Actually, I think that's 16 years. I was just going to say, yeah, okay, well, I think we pretty much reached almost our time. Does anyone have anything else that wanted to add John or Gregory?
**\[42:46\]** **Sean:** I agree with Mike. I think we hit the wall here. We've had a great topic. So Gregory, can you tell us where visitors can find you online, your website, your social media, any other places that we can learn about you?
**\[43:04\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** then you can find my website is gjdv.ca that will be in the show notes and I have a blog there so you can also read about WordPress stuff but it won't necessarily be what the best plugins and stuff like that but it will help you overall in the big picture as well as I have a Twitter and LinkedIn page for my company so that you can find that stuff directly there. There might not always be directly WordPress related, but it might still help the website in general. Again, that's important for everybody. All that stuff will be linked in the show notes.
**\[43:43\]** **Sean:** Yeah. Awesome. Thanks. Thanks so much for Gregory for coming out. And anybody who's looking for WordPress help, make sure you check out Gregory. Yeah.
**\[43:52\]** **SPEAKER\_00:** Thanks a lot, Gregory.
**\[43:53\]** **Sean:** Thank you guys for having me. Hey, thank you so much for listening to this episode. My name is Sean Smith. You're co-host. And you can find me at my website, caffeinecreations.ca, on Twitter, caffeine creation that's spelled C-A-F-F-E-I-N-E-C-R-E-8-I-O-N. And also, I'm on LinkedIn, caffeine creations.
**\[44:18\]** **Mike:** And I'm Mike Mella, and you can find me online at B-Likewater.ca. and I'm also on LinkedIn and Twitter. My username is Mike Mella. That's M-I-K-E-M-E-L-L-L-A.
Close Transcript
Have a question for Sean, Mike, and Amanda? [Send us an email](/contact).
[](https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93ZWJzaXRlMTAxcG9kY2FzdC5jb20vZmVlZC5yc3M%3D)[](https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/website-101-podcast/id1449510012)[](https://open.spotify.com/show/3rmSM1R9t6q1U8DmYWJRSO?si=NrYPMgDaRV6Dd56PjEaPow)### Season 03
- 1 [ Do You Really Need a Website](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-03/episode-1/do-you-really-need-a-website/)
- 2 [ Wordpress](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-03/episode-2/wordpress/)
- 3 [ How to Adapt During an Emergency: A Special Website 101 Podcast](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-03/episode-3/adapting-during-an-emergency/)
- 4 [ Video Marketing: Boosting Business with Video Content](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-03/episode-4/using-video/)
- 5 [ Vacations and Website Maintenance: Navigating the Challenges of Time Off](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-03/episode-5/vacations/)
- 6 [ There's a plugin for that](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-03/episode-6/theres-a-plugin-for-that/)
- 7 [ Backups: Why You Need Them and How to Implement Them](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-03/episode-7/backups/)
- 8 [ Using Custom Email Addresses: A Professional Touch for Your Business](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-03/episode-8/email/)
- 9 [ The Importance of Website Maintenance Plans and Retainers](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-03/episode-9/maintenance-plans/)
- 10 [ How to Conduct a Content Audit for Your Website](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-03/episode-10/content-audits/)
- 11 [ Own Your Content](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-03/episode-11/own-your-content/)
### All Seasons
- [Season 01](https://website101podcast.com/season/01/)
- [Season 02](https://website101podcast.com/season/02/)
- [Season 03](https://website101podcast.com/season/03/)
- [Season 04](https://website101podcast.com/season/04/)
- [Season 05](https://website101podcast.com/season/05/)
- [Season 06](https://website101podcast.com/season/06/)
- [Season 07](https://website101podcast.com/season/07/)
- [Season 08](https://website101podcast.com/season/08/)
- [Season 09](https://website101podcast.com/season/09/)
<!\[CDATA\[YII-BLOCK-BODY-END\]\]>