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I am an experience WordPress web designer. I have an average of two to five WordPress website design clients every month. How does EE web design compare to WordPress website design in regards to flexibility in customizing themes and templates, the availability of free plugin software, built in search engine optimization compatibility and functionality, ease of content management, upgrade-ability and portability. Also, how do I justify adding an additional $250 to my web design client’s bill? What is EE going to offer my client for an extra $250 that WordPress can’t offer for free? Thanks! I appreciate you taking the time to answer this question. I look forward to hearing what you have to say.

I am an experience WordPress web designer. I have an average of two to five WordPress website design clients every month. How does EE web design compare to WordPress website design in regards to flexibility in customizing themes and templates, the availability of free plugin software, built in search engine optimization compatibility and functionality, ease of content management, upgrade-ability and portability. Also, how do I justify adding an additional $250 to my web design client’s bill? What is EE going to offer my client for an extra $250 that WordPress can’t offer for free? Thanks! I appreciate you taking the time to answer this question. I look forward to hearing what you have to say.

Hi Razworks welcome to the EE forums!

This is an unofficial reply, I’m sure the support team will give an official answer soon.

It’s generally not a good thing to compare the two because each excels in it’s own environment and have radically different approaches. At the end of the day you choose the right system for the content and the site owner.

Themes and templates
EE doesn’t have a plug n play themeing system like WP. Instead you have templating system made up of several types:
- template groups, eg a subset of templates that have a common purpose, you might have a template group for “product” content templates, another for “blog” content templates and another for “embed” templates. There’s no hard and fast rule how you set up groups.
- templates, eg a template for a page type, an embed, even CSS, RSS and JS can be created as templates
- snippets, eg reusable blocks of code
- global variables, eg static block of code, common uses include things like Google Analytics code, static bits of text and so on
- EE tags, eg you place tags in templates where you want your content to be outputted
- you can build templates offline and use EE’s syncing feature to update the site or develop them in the admin

All this gives you complete freedom with how you build and structure your site. Essentially you start with a blank sheet and build it your way.

Addons
Check out http://devot-ee.com/ which is the main EE repository. While some are “no cost” others are commercial, in constant development, and most importantly include developer support. Unlike WP, EE addons tend to be fewer but you have to remember that EE will do a lot of stuff out of the box without the need for numerous addons. Also EE addons tend to be good quality, I’m sure you’ll agree that with WP for every good quality addon there are a dozen naff ones!

Search engine optimiation
Again this is something you build into your site as required - not every site or bit of content needs a “meta description”! You can do this by creating custom fields for meta tags, page titles for whatever types of content you need them for. There are addons such as “Better Meta” that offer a generic solution if it suits the needs of the project.

Ease of management
Probably the biggest difference between WP and EE is that in WP you manage “posts”, whereas in EE you manage “content”. In EE a blog entry and product entry can have different input fields and a different set of categories, or you can share, say, a category group” between the two but have different entry input fields.

With EE you use “Channels” to hold different types of content. You could say create a Video Channel then call one or more videos into say a blog post. This approach gives you a huge amount of flexibility with manipulating content, the video could then appear in your blog post, or you could just output a list of videos somewhere else, or even with each video list all the blog posts it’s included in.

“Justifying” the price of a licence
For most EE developers this is rarely a problem, the cost in man hours can often be recouped by not having to spend ages trying to bend XYZ CMS to get it to do what you want, when it can be done in EE without any real hassle. Of course if you’re doing cheap $500 sites EE probably isn’t a good fit, if you’re doing $1500+ sites then in my opinion it’s money well spent.

Hope that helps!

$250?? Since when?

Hi Razworks,

Welcome to the forums!

There isn’t much I can add to Rob (bluedreamer’s post)! One thing I would mention though is that EE can also be thought of as a development platform rather than just a CMS that can be extended. EE is built on the CodeIgniter PHP framework and, in simple terms, EE is a CodeIgniter application. It’s possible (and relatively straightforward) to build all sorts of functionality that isn’t traditionally part of what you might find in a CMS. And of course that additional functionality would be seamlessly integrated with EE’s authentication, members, content etc. This power though doesn’t get in the way; your clients will find EE’s control panel to be intuitive and content editing is a simple (and flexible) process.

Does that help?

Cheers

Greg

Thanks for your detailed and very informative replies. Much appreciated. From Rob’s reply, it sounds like EE is module based web design templating system, sort of like Joomla. Is the EE backend at all similar to Joomla’s? I’ve had several web design clients specifically request to be moved from Joomla to WordPress because the backend website administration is to complicated for them. From a web designer perspective, a module based CMS is a powerful tool that garners much respect. From a web design client’s perspective, a simpler, more intuitive administration system like WordPress is preferable. In my experience with hundreds of web design clients, I’ve discovered that clients are often technically challenged. Some web design clients even have difficulty working with the super easy WordPress backend. If you can customize the backend of the website as easy as you can customize the frontend web design, then that is a very useful website CMS.

Hi Razworks

Yes EE is “modular”, though a lot more flexible and user friendly than Joomla, especially in the templating department!

The entire EE backend can be customised for each user (based on their member group), essentially you allow/disallow them access to certain admin features by member group, eg “Authors” might only be able to post and edit their own content and not access anything else, whereas “Editors” can add/edit all content that any authors add, and Site admins are the only people allowed to access site configs etc etc - you get the idea.

You can also create your own Control panel CSS, brand it with the clients logo, and even do “front end” publishing/editing with the free Safecracker addon if you didn’t want certain users accessing the control panel.

If you want a quick play with the backed our friends at Webunder.com.au have an online demo - http://webunder.com.au/weblog/expressionengine-2.1-demo/ - note that most features have been disabled in the demo but at least you’ll be able to get a feel for it. Otherwise EE offer a 30 day money back guarantee if you wanted buy a licence to evaluate.

I hear you, most clients are technically challenged aren’t they! In my experience I’ve never had any clients that have had any major problems using EE, some pick it up in 10 minutes, other take a few hours and a bit of hand holding while they find their way around, but the same is true with any system.

Hi Razworks,

As Rob says, EE’s functionality is abstracted into modules though I don’t think you’ll find that a distraction since you have fine-grained control over the access that different member groups have.

Cheers

Greg

@Rob, thanks very much.

I think the main difference between EE and Wordpress is this: Wordpress is good for Posts and Pages. Doing other types of content and relating it to entries, for example, is much harder to do with WP. EE, on the other hand, you can create any kind of content types that you want, and can include them on any template, or relate them to entries.

WP is more plug and play, including themeing options. EE you have granular control over everything.

Another example that shows a difference: in EE, you can have just the fields your client needs to show up when they add or edit a post or any content type.

For quick and dirty sites, I use WP. It’s easier (and probably more important) to keep updated, right from the admin…

But, for most of my client sites, I much prefer EE. And if $500 is gonna break the bank, maybe they shouldn’t hire a web designer. I just fold it into my costs of development (I include $500 because there are some must have modules that could bring the total costs up to $500)

I’ve also developed in Drupal (which, I think is close to Joomla) and it is a totally different beast. EE is a nimble, elegant, delightful platform where all the development is front end/html kind of work. Drupal requires all kinds of workarounds to get it to work the way you want it, often employing php etc. I find Drupal a pain to host (requires a much more beefy server) and I find it slow to develop on, page loads are super slow.

It’s hard, because I have a lot of potential clients who are “sold” on Drupal, because it’s Open Source and “free”. The budgets, ironically for these jobs are so much better, though. So, they know it is not free… it costs money in development.

Hope that helps!

I’d add that, in my time in freelance work before I joined EllisLab, I much preferred rolling the cost of ExpressionEngine into development because it was a joy to develop new sites with. It’s so unbelievably flexible with content entry and display. I didn’t do sites in the sub $2,000 range, so the cost of EE was always recouped in quicker development time.

One other thing to note: I’m not sure about how Joomla’s administration operates, but ExpressionEngine’s CP is workflow-based, so it’s a lot more intuitive for end-users. And like several folks have noted in posts above, you can choose to show only relevant CP functions to your clients. For the really technically-challenged, you can employ SafeCracker to develop your own “control panel” for your clients to submit and edit content.

For a quick-and-dirty blog, I still love Wordpress. When it comes to doing almost anything else, Wordpress starts to show its seems and require a lot of unnecessary development time. That’s kind of the rough rubric I used when deciding which platform to use for a project.

Kevin