Once upon a time (2002, to be precise) a web UI developer decided to strike out on her own and make websites for people. She was good at it. The hard part was that people wanted to be able to maintain the site themselves.
That developer was me. And I couldn’t find any great, not-too-technical options to allow people to make changes to their site after I handed it off to them. We’ve come a long way since then! I returned to working for IBM, WordPress came on the scene in 2003, and said to myself, “if I ever strike out on my own again I will use WordPress.” And here we are.
Since then, WordPress has become the most popular Content Management System (CMS), allowing people to create and maintain content without having to work in code and all the other technical pieces that go along with that. There are some other what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSISYG) website builders, but you can’t get to the code with them which you can with WordPress. This makes WordPress more flexible and powerful. And your WordPress site is not tied to any particular web host.
Like other website builders, WordPress does a lot for you. It is a huge ecosystem of themes (for the look and feel), plugins (for added functionality), and support (lots of documentation, and lots of people using this platform so it’s easier to find answers).
I consider WordPress to be a perfect fit for someone who has their feet in both the design and development worlds. That someone is me.
As far as maintaining your own site, there are user roles that can be set up so you can’t accidentally delete something. And if something does go wrong, or if your developer needs to make more intricate changes, she can log in to your site remotely. Anybody with login credentials can, so you can have multiple people set up to maintain different parts of your site.
I wish WordPress had been around when I struck out on my own the first time. I certainly am glad it is around now!