May 16, 2017

Why Django?

On average, once a week, I get a query about running a website in WordPress. It often starts like this: “Hi Bartek. I am looking for someone who will take care of our company website (the guy who made it, did not finish the work)" or "Hello, someone infected the site, will you help? Google has marked my site as unsafe."

I started to wonder why "some guys don't finish their work" and concluded that where anything more than "click to download template" or "add plugin" starts, the guy's end, they disappear. It's fun to use WordPress to create simple blogging websites, but what next? It does not bother me that such people "put websites on WP" - their client usually goes to me anyway. Is the purchaser lossy? Yes. He pays double. Well, maybe not double, but twice. Dedicated websites (customized to individual customer needs) are definitely more expensive.

The pros of WordPress are that you may put it anywhere - as long as PHP and FTP hosting will do, but what about long-term website maintenance? What about bug fixes and development? What about later updates? Usually, later the site starts to live its life (outside the owner's control), no security fixes are introduced, and the site waits its turn when an ambitious kid starts a bot looking randomly on the Internet for vulnerable sites ...

I am generalizing a bit; of course, many people professionally create websites based on WordPress, but such people represent something more than the ability to "click" a website in CMS; they can add or modify a template and plugins programmers.

Another thing I noticed is that the WordPress code template creates code redundantly, making pages heavy, 10 lines of CSS imports, redundant divs, redundant id attributes, where the same can be done by making 90% less code. This is a great advantage of customer-specific templates.

I am not saying that the websites we prepare in Django are written without ready-made templates - we also use them. Still, we fully control them and approach each page individually, removing unnecessary code, which significantly speeds up their operation.

Of course, our websites are not 100% protected against attacks, but the probability of accidentally breaking into pages created by us is much lower than on pages made in CMS Drupal, Joomla!, or WordPress because of their niche.