wordpress

We’re proud to present our latest project, the interactive Fast TV Channels Website Series for Blue Ant Media. Headquartered in Toronto, Blue Ant Media is a privately held global media company, with offices in five other countries besides Canada.

The Blue Ant team needed a platform to promote some of the newest shows streaming on popular platforms like Roku, LG Channels, Xumo, Vizio, Samsung TV Plus and others, while targeting content for specific countries worldwide and turned to Vertical team for design and development. The Blue Ant and Vertical teams have an outstanding relationship, as we’re providing ongoing maintenance and support for their other projects, like CottageLife, MobileSyrup, BeMakeful, TheBabyShows and other successful websites over the past year.

The challenge was to create a platform that delivers a similar design template across all websites, but promotes specific content for each individual site at the same time. The platform is engineered using our in-house design and a backend structure based on WordPress and Divi, plus additional custom built plugins. At the same time, each website displays country specific shows and streaming channels using a geolocation functionality identifying visitor IP. A default page is displayed if no shows are available in a particular country; otherwise the users are redirected towards Canada, US or Europe specific pages depending on their location.

Another advanced functionality allows administrators make bulk plugin and core updates and content edits across all websites using a single master admin system. The master-slave backend system is designed to reduce operation times and simplify maintenance. At the same time, each website can be updated individually as needed and can act as an independent app.

Here’s a quick overview of the of the Fast TV Channels top features:

• Unified layout design
• Simplified administration interface using both frontend and backend access
• One site controls all
• Geolocated content display based on user IP
• Custom 3D shows carousel
• Fully responsive

The Fast TV Channels include HauntTV, CrimetimeTV, LovePetsTV, HomefulTV, DragRaceUniverseTV, TotalCrimeTV and HistoryTimeTV. The series of channels does not stop here. Several new channels will be added in the near future to complete the list, offering info on the newest and most exciting shows available on popular streaming platforms worldwide.

WordPress has come a long way since it was launched back in 2003.

From a simple blogging platform it has evolved into a powerful and highly customizable CMS, a fully fledged complex website solution. Moreover, over the past five years it has gained a significant share of the CMS market, with about 60% of all websites running it as their CMS.

While competing CMS solutions, like Drupal and Joomla have continued to trend downwards, WordPress has been gaining worldwide appreciation from both, end users and developers thanks to a continuous process of innovation.

Let’s take a closer look at the plain facts, to understand the CMS market evolution up to 2019, according to statistics:

• MS Market share: 60.2% WP, 6.3% Joomla and 4.4% Drupal.
• Number of live sites (estimated): 75.000.000 WP, 2.000.000 Joomla, 1.000.000 Drupal
• All web: 34% WP, 4% Joomla, 2% Drupal

As you can see above, the numbers are pretty astonishing.
As active participants in the design and development space for more than 10 years, we’ve been working with, customizing and implementing all of the above systems into client projects.
Each of them has their own strengths and weaknesses depending on project, however, as it stands today, WordPress is by far the most intuitive, versatile and cost effective CMS out of the box.

From our experience, in the last few years, a lot of Drupal CMS projects have been replaced by WordPress. We do migrations from Drupal to WordPress regularly now, a major change from a few years ago, when the opposite was a lot more common.

Businesses and developers slowly moved away from Drupal and focused on WordPress, due to its increased ease of use, modularity and highly efficient plug and play plugins, intuitive publishing system and content administration.

While each new version of WordPress focuses on enhancing performance, flexibility and usability, bringing new features and simplifying administration and development, the latest version of Drupal, Drupal 8, really managed to mess things up.

Drupal not only changed the whole implementation model for developers, but became more difficult to work with overall, buggy and with a lack of basic core functionalities. One example is the need to write custom code or install third party modules, just to open a link in a new browser tab.

In a stark direct contracts to Drupal, WordPress offers extensive flexibility and versatility and comes with ton of features out of the box, that cover almost any functionality a website might need.

It’s pretty easy and straight forward to work with from an end-user perspective: if you need an online store, you just install and configure WooCommerce; you need a forum or community, just add BBpress or BuddyPress to the mix. Easy, reliable, clean development, intuitive administration system, reliable support.

Moreover, as said before, using WordPress to power a website is much more cost effective than using pretty much any other CMS currently available. The development cycle is not that time consuming, testing is cleaner and easier, updates and upgrades can be done on the fly and without extensive maintenance and downtime.
Also, the overall back-end administration system is more user friendly and most features are focused on usability.

In summary, the advantages of using WordPress are many, from lower development costs, an easy management and publishing system to multiple functionalities. WP can be used for basic presentation sites, as well as advanced custom and complex web applications, forums, data collection platforms, e-commerce stores and more.

We highly recommend it here at VerticalWave and if you happen to need some help with a new or existing website project, don’t be shy and give us a shout.

Cheers.

With the rapid rise of online shops and stores in the internet environment, it was only a matter of time before the market became saturated with all sorts of eCommerce platforms, more or less reliable, created to enhance the experience of users and owners alike.

However, only a few such platforms are indeed ready to meet modern security and usability demands. As a matter of fact, WooCommerce, Magento and Shopify dominate the industry, accounting together for around 70% of the market share. Statistics show that Shopify registered a significant growth in the market share in 2016, while Magento and WooCommerce registered a slight decline. A closer look at the pros and cons of these three platforms will showcase the market’s fluctuation.

Shopify is more than a simple eCommerce software bundle. It is an all-in-one turn-key solution for starting and managing online commerce business generic lexapro. It can be used out of the box, or customized according to specific needs. Shopify is suited for businesses of all sizes, as it is very cost-effective and easy to manage, granting users total control over all buy and sell options.

Pros:

• Enhanced security
• Enhanced speed
• Easily integrates with various CMS platforms like Drupal, Joomla and more
• Various theme options
• Easily integrates with most payment gateways
• Provides physical and digital goods inventory management
• Intuitive inventory import and export options
• SEO friendly
• Intuitive administration panel
• Easily integrates with third party services (email services, site metrics and more)
• Offers mobile-ready commerce out of the box
• Analytics support
• Social media integration

Cons:

• Special customization requires development and coding skills
• Built-in blogging feature is not very well polished
• Initial setup can require a bit of tech knowledge
• Shopify integrated payment system works for a limited number of countries (US, Canada, Australia and UK), but this does not apply to the other payment options
• The Lite plan does not offer very rich online store features

Magento represents a suite of eCommerce platforms, solutions, and CMS software that can be used individually or as a bundle. It can be considered a CMS only to a certain extent, although not as widely used as Drupal, WordPress and Joomla, as it has a specific target audience. Written in PHP, it is strongly focused on e-commerce and used by retailers and online shops.

Pros:

• E-Commerce ready solutions
• Support for multiple stores, carts, languages and currencies
• Good SEO options
• Shipping and tax calculation options
• Flexible template options
• Easy administration panel management
• Easy product creation

Cons:

• Slower loading speeds
• Needs extra customization out of the box
• Paid Enterprise and Premium Enterprise versions
• Potential server hosting issues due to size and loading speed
• Rather difficult development work to enable specific features and options
• Potential update issues
• No default omni-channel option

WooCommerce is a customizable platform designed in form of a plugin. It is the most widely used solution mainly because it is free and it integrates seamlessly with WordPress based sites. WooCommerce offers various extensions and themes specifically built for WP, but it does not work with sites powered by other content management systems.

Pros:

• Free
• Flexible product configuration options
• Integrates perfectly with WordPress
• Various payment options
• Provides good control over taxes, inventory and user accounts
• User review and rating system
• Lots of themes available
• Great option for basic stores

Cons:

• Does not work outside of the WordPress framework
• Custom functionalities coding is costly
• Maintenance and security depend on the site/store administrator/owner
• Compatibility issues when updating site/plugin
• Visual editor is not extremely efficient
• Premium themes and extensions are costly
• No hosting options

Taking into consideration these facts, we believe Shopify to be the most balanced eCommerce solution in terms of scalability and cost efficiency. As WooCommerce is exclusively built for WordPress and Magento offers more expensive business plans, there’s no wonder that Shopify has gained consistent percentages in market share in 2016.

Today’s content management systems are built to adapt to various industry needs and provide the developer and end user with lots of tools for creating and managing websites and web apps. There’s a wide array of content management systems available on the market, but only a handful of them are widely used and extremely popular.

Drupal, WordPress and Joomla alone power more than 70% of all websites across the globe, from simple, personal websites, to enterprise portals, advanced apps and more. Each of these CMSs have pros and cons, based on their scalability, cost efficiency, ease of use and other features. Let’s take a look at some of the advantages and disadvantages of using them, from both the point of view of the developer and of the end user.

Drupal is by far the most versatile CMS when it comes to building complex websites and apps, with lots of custom features. It is extremely scalable and extensible, perfect for corporate websites, intranet solutions, e-commerce sites, NGO websites, mobile apps and more.

Pros:

• Various APIs and third party service integration available out of the box
• Powerful multilingual and translation options
• Intuitive content and user database management system
• Mobile-ready
• Enhanced security and regular updates available
• Modern UI and UX
• Developer-friendly engine
• Feature rich and powerful publishing system
• Content revision system useful for rollback
• Open-source
• SEO-friendly

Cons:

• Requires good server system resources
• Requires good development techniques for optimal customization and configuration
• Some scripts can take longer time to load if not tweaked properly
• Compatibility with older and obsolete systems (hosting server versions, browser versions) requires extra development

WorDpress is the most popular CMS to date, mainly because it is very easy to use thanks to its friendly, blog-like interface. However, WordPress is basically suited for simpler applications, which do not require advanced features, like personal and presentation websites with less content.

Pros:

• Lots of themes available
• Simple publishing and editing system
• Does not require advanced development skills to manage content
• Fast market entry for SMBs and other entities that don’t need a strong online presence
• SEO-friendly
• Mobile-friendly
• Integrated blogging platform

Cons:

• Paid extra features (additional storage space and more complex features)
• Most WordPress sites look the same, with minor differences
• Not enough flexibility to implement specific features
• Compatibility and security issues with several plugins
• Requires numerous updates to prevent security issues

Joomla is another popular CMS. It packs more options in terms of scalability compared to WordPress, but it is still less feature-rich compared to Drupal see it here. Joomla is built on a model–view–controller web app for better flexibility and usability.

Pros:

• Open-source
• E-Commerce oriented
• Flexible in terms of content and structure
• Simple administration interface
• Does not require advanced development knowledge to configure

Cons:

• Limited number of modules and templates available, which equals less possible customization options
• Requires extra server resources
• Paid plugins for extra options
• Plugin compatibility issues
• Limited options in terms of feature development

Wix, Weebly, Webs and others can be considered content management systems only to a certain extent. Wix, Weebly, Webs and other similar solutions (Jimdo, Squarespace) are in fact website building platforms, designed like web based CMS, with ease of use in mind. All of these platforms share virtually common strengths and weaknesses and are targeted towards non-tech savvy users, as they do not require any coding skills or much training to work. These platforms are mostly used for building personal websites, SMB websites or even small online shops, but are not suited for complex solutions.

Pros:

• Out of the box features
• Easy to use drag and drop web-based admin interface
• Fair SEO options
• No technical skills required to set up or work with
• Fair amount of templates available
• Possible integration with third party services

Cons:

• Lack of flexibility in terms of custom features
• Paid subscription plans for extra features
• Ads included with free plans
• Limited template customization and configuration options
• No real control over databases and server configuration
• No extensibility

Drupal remains the top choice for building complex and powerful, yet user-friendly websites and apps, as it is highly scalable and offers a comprehensive set of tools and features for both developers and end-users. It is designed to offer flawless digital experiences across all industries. However, WordPress, Joomla, Magento and web based platforms all have their advantages. The key aspect to consider when building a website remains its purpose and array of functionalities. Defining the end goal is decisive.