What are CMS, WordPress, and Woocommerce?

When you start thinking and looking at how to have a website, you often cross the words like CMS, WordPress or Woocommerce. What does that mean?

There are several ways to have a website built depending on your budget, your marketing strategy and what you would like to do with your website.

When the net has started, all the websites were built in HTML and CSS (JAVA). Those names are the name of languages that are readable by the internet.

There are still lots of websites built like that but less and less are. Firstly because for websites built only with those languages, all updates have to be made by a professional web developer. And also because that way of creating a website is longer, the price is also more expensive.

Mainly used for the Statique website (a website that doesn’t sell products or has a blog), it is nowadays possible to have also a shop or a blog. That includes that the developer needs to create an interface for you to enter your products. It is a highly time-consuming process that permits you to have all the customizations you would like, with the high price that goes with it.

CMS stands for “Content Management System”. That software could have for name WordPress, Joomla, Prestashop, Magento, Wix, Woo-commerce.

Those CMS have their own specialties and qualities. They are software that allows to create, edit and published some content. They are especially there for the backend.

While above for the HTML/CSS websites, web developers needed to build the front end of a website (the visible part for the visitors), they needed to build also the backend (software to manage the content) in different languages such as C# for one of them.

CMS is saving then time to have the backend already built.

Those Content Management systems can be free and Open source (like WordPress or Prestashop) or pay by subscription like Wix.

The most popular CMS actually is WordPress. 34% of all websites (CMS and HTML/CSS) that are present on the web are using that technology. One of the reasons is that WordPress is a very flexible CMS that supports a lot of different websites, like static websites, online store websites, booking websites or blogs…

Websites built with WordPress are saving time in development and therefore would be more affordable websites.

They can also be customized to fit the closest to your brand and company. The web agencies or developers will be there to personalize the front end of your website.

Some agencies would suggest using WordPress theme. Theme or template is already built design for your front end. It is an even cheaper way of having a website built, though it might not be the best investment. Without the branding of your company and website, you could not stand out in the jungle of the internet. It is important that you decide what would be the strategy of your company and the way you want to promote yourself.

Another strength of WordPress is the fact that you can install WordPress extensions in order to offer more services on your website and especially offer the possibility to sell online. The more used and secured eCommerce platform for WordPress is a Woocommerce plugin. Woocommerce is free software that allows you to create an online store.

When you install Woocommerce, you will need to set the settings, the different payment gateways, the shipping options as well as all the requirements for an online shop.

Those settings can be challenging and it exists WordPress and Woocommerce developers here to help.

While you have the choice of the way your website will be built, your decision should be based on what you would like to do with your website. If you would like a highly customized website and your company has the money to pay for, then you should look for a professional HTML/CSS/C# developer.

If you would like an evolutive and responsive website, that allows the installation of an online store, then WordPress and Woocommerce would the option for you. See the Woocommerce options we have set in place for one of our clients.