Tech Tidbits Ep. 7: Andrew Derse
episode 07
A Look In To “WordPress World”
In Tech Tidbits Episode 07, Chris Teigen interviews Andrew Derse about how Creed does WordPress and open source web design. Andrew also talks about what excites him about AI and the future of web development.
Check out some of the amazing WordPress work he’s done with Route92 and Collegis Education!
Chris: All right, so we’re here today with Mr. Andrew Derse, who is the team lead on our open-source team, or otherwise known as our CMS team, I guess you’d call it for layman’s terms.
Andrew: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
Chris: Yeah. Um, are you ready for a few questions? I’m just gonna dive right into these.
Andrew: Let’s do it. All right.
Chris: First question, when should we use WordPress and when should we use something other than WordPress?
Andrew: That’s a great question. Um, scoping out what platform to use really depends on how comfortable the user is managing and maintaining the website is with doing content management. Um, WordPress lends itself to be very user-friendly from an administration standpoint. You can add tons of pages, posts, create menus, and attach those pages to the menus pretty easily. Um, WordPress tends to be used for marketing websites, you know, front-end things. Not so much for intranets or portals or things like that, but more for visibility, getting your business out there, a simple website to get out there, but it’s incredibly powerful and flexible and can be used for these other things. Um, but it is best known for, you know, like a marketing website kind of thing to get your company’s exposure out there on the internet.
Chris: Sure. All right. Next question. What are WordPress’s strengths and weaknesses?
Andrew: Absolutely. Kinda hit on that a little bit. Um, it’s incredibly user-friendly from an administration standpoint. Um, so for one strength there, another strength there is, from a development standpoint, it can be incredibly flexible, um, to extend and build on plugins and themes. It is, by far, one of the most my favorite platforms to develop in. Um, I think the statistic is somewhere around 30 to 40% of the internet is built on WordPress, and there’s a good reason why it is just so user-friendly, both from an administration side and from a development side, which lends to just constant innovation on the platform. Um, some of the weaknesses, there is a general maintenance cost to it that you have to stay on top of, um, to keep everything nice and secure, but the pros far outweigh the cons there.
Chris: You’re a little biased. Maybe.
Andrew: Uh, maybe.
Chris: Alright, next question. What does, how does WordPress compare to other CMSs?
Andrew: Yeah. Um, if I think about ease of adoption, um, would that and other CMSs in the same space? I would think WordPress, Drupal, Magento, um, WordPress by far is the easiest to adopt, uh, just in the aspect that there’s tons of people out there doing it already. So there’s tons of documentation out there. Um, Joomla is a little bit more difficult to adopt. The documentation is a little lacking. It’s there, the community is a little lacking. Drupal’s a little bit more advanced, um, than Joomla. Tons of documentation. The community is a little bit more like an expert community. Magento as well. Magento, huge learning curve. Um, tons of documentation, but you need to be certified if you want to be a really good Magento developer. You don’t have to be. But, um, we, we tend just to stay away from those, just from the high technical level of adoption of those platforms. Um, yeah, WordPress by far is the easiest to enter, easiest to adopt, easiest to extend within the frameworks. But again, everything comes down to what is the right platform for the client, for what they’re seeking, what the business rules are, business requirements are for that particular project. We tend to lean towards WordPress because they want to own the content management piece of it. They want to be able to have their people create the pages, move the content around and publish whenever they want to. So that’s more of a WordPress thing.
Chris: Alright. What excites you about WordPress?
Andrew: Oh, man. Oh, WordPress just keeps getting better and better. If we look at it from like 10 years ago, it was a terrible platform. Um, it was mainly used for just like pushing out blocks and writing articles and things like that. But now we’re seeing it do just about everything. Honestly. E-commerce platforms, um, built on WordPress. I stood one up a couple of years ago that’s doing tens of thousands of dollars in just e-commerce sales. It’s incredible what WordPress can do. The fact that you can embed, um, frameworks like Vue inside of it or, uh, React and do this headless CMS kind of thing, that’s also exciting. That was a recent thing within WordPress over the last couple of years. It’s getting faster and faster, uh, which is exciting. More secure. Yeah, tons, tons of things when, like I said before, WordPress is only limited to what your imagination is. So if you can imagine whatever you can imagine for a website, you can do it with WordPress.
Chris: What other technologies excite you?
Andrew: Um, so I’m, I’m a WordPress guy. But, um, I do love JavaScript, so Vue.js is really cool. Um, I’ve been playing around with Next.js a little bit, um, which is a React framework, which is really cool. Um, static site generation, super fast, super cool. Um, AWS is another one that excites me a lot. I do a lot of deployments to AWS and, um, just the fact that you can host a website out there for pennies, really. Uh, tons of different services out there, like Lambda and S3, CloudFront, um, RDS, Aurora. I could go on and on about AWS. Um, yeah, those are probably the top three. AWS, JavaScript, WordPress.
Chris: All right. Thank you so much for your time today, Andrew. We really appreciate it.
Andrew: Absolutely. Thank you.
Chris: Alright. And that’s all we have for today, folks. Thanks for tuning in.
