Hi! We're Joe Web, providing the best website design in Asheville, NC

How we're different than other Asheville web designers

Like many web design shops, we initially relied heavily on building WordPress sites. However, we quickly realized that WordPress was not the best solution for many of our small business clients. These clients often lacked:

1. interest or skills to navigate the WordPress dashboard and
2. time for regularly maintaining their sites to keep them secure

WordPress sites are simply more work and hassle than many small business operators need.

WordPress requires time and patience to master.

Wordpress offers many features that, while great if they are used, simply complicate the dashboard and introduce security concerns when not needed. And keeping WordPress sites updated is crucial.

For instance:

Example #1) I recently heard about an interesting online marketing company. When I clicked on their listing on Google, I immediately encountered a security warning instead of their website.

The site was infected! Curious, I checked their latest site capture on archive.org and found that it had been four years since their last WordPress update.

Example #2) A couple weeks later, I wanted to visit the website of an award winning design studio. Again, I was blocked by my virus checker.

It's a different virus this time. When I looked up the site on archive.org, once again it's a WordPress site. But this one hasn't been updated in EIGHT years!

Example #3) A week or so later, visiting another website threw this error message. They apparently tried to update WordPress, but now their hosting account isn't current enough.

Fig #3: This site's WordPress updates failed because server software may not have been updated since 2019.

It's no wonder that WordPress sites are vulnerable to malicious attacks. If web marketing and design studios can't keep their WordPress updated, it's not surprising that other small businesses struggle as well.

Updating WordPress isn't always easy

Unfortunately, WordPress isn't always stress-free or easy to update. Within the past month, two small businesses contacted us in a panic. They had encountered critical error messages while performing WordPress updates.

Fortunately, neither of these issues were serious. We were able to resolve them quickly and provide solutions that may help prevent them in the future. But such error messages are always stressful and not always easy to resolve.

Why our custom websites are better

For the above reasons, we often discourage our small business clients from using WordPress. Unlike WordPress sites, our custom, PHP file-based sites require no user maintenance or updates. They are more secure (with no database, third-party plugins, or themes to update), use cleaner code, load quickly, and are very search engine friendly.

(That said, WordPress still has its place. It is a great choice for eCommerce sites with dozens or hundreds of products, content-heavy sites that frequently add pages and update content, or sites that need to track user history. However, for most small businesses, we believe WordPress presents unnecessary hassle and worry compared to our PHP file-based sites.)