Benefits of Northern Village CMS over WordPress

As the founder of Northern Village, I am regularly asked why we prefer not to use WordPress to manage our websites. It is a good question.

Comfort of never having to do an upgrade WordPress is by far the most popular CMS in the world today (60% of websites using a CMS use WordPress). There are lots of different modules that allow you to do anything you would want to do. Prospective clients often ask for it, or even require it.

However, instead of WordPress, we use the Northern Village CMS that is powered by YikeSite. It helps us create modern, responsive, easily editable/updatable websites with components that work in sync with each other. We love the fact that this gives our clients a greater degree of control without having to worry about the nuts and bolts of keeping a website going.

We work with four principles that lead to this recommendation:

Websites must be easily updated
We're building websites as opposed to blogs
Basic components must work well together
No upgrades ever

Each of these principles is described in more detail below. For a more technical article see our blog post on YikeSite.

Websites must be easily updated

Creating websites is all about getting things done as quickly and easily as possible. WordPress has some fantastic modules available for websites, and there are more being created all the time. This allows experienced web developers to create just about anything. However, as the flexibility with the modules increases, so does the difficulty in editing your website. This includes simple text edits, working with images, and making sure that all of it works well on mobile devices.

Within the Northern Village CMS, you are always one click away from turning your page into an editor that allows for quick content changes without affecting the design and responsiveness of your site. Our clients particularly love this feature because they can effortlessly update their websites without having to pay a developer.

Building websites as opposed to blogs

One of the strengths of WordPress is that it builds fully featured blogs with categories, tags, commenting, and more. However, this does not translate as well for creating custom websites. Whereas a blog is a long list of posts, a website is hierarchical. A long list of articles is replaced with a full menuing system. WordPress gets around this limitation by having a separate menu system pointing to the "Pages" of the website.

Within the Northern Village CMS, it is easy to add, delete, and move pages within the website and have it automatically be reflected in the menu system. This makes it easy to maintain the website on a regular basis.

Basic website components work well together

WordPress has many modules, widgets, and add-ons that make the possibilities of what will work almost infinite. However, we find most websites do not need this high level of customization, and are just fine with basic web components such as carousels/galleries, FAQs, calendars, multi-section pages and blogs.

Northern Village focuses on providing the most popular components and ensuring they work flawlessly together. Any additional customization we provide does not compromise the ease with which the website can be edited or maintained.

No upgrades ever

There are a number of excellent services that have taken on the task of keeping WordPress websites up to date. Some web companies have their own servers, or use managed WordPress services to keep sites current. On the other hand, some people have let their upgrades slip, and run the risk of having their website compromised.

We believe that you should never have to upgrade a website. Specifically, we believe:

There is no need to go through the process of upgrading, every month.
Your site should not go down because of an "upgrade".
You should not get warnings that your site may be compromised because you failed to do an upgrade

Northern Village focuses on building websites that do not need updates. Our clients like this because they can concentrate on running their business or organization and rest assured that their website is working smoothly at all times.

Moving over your WordPress site

Interested in moving your website over to an easily updated website? Northern Village specializes in taking WordPress sites and moving them over to the Northern Village CMS. We can take all your content, move it over (we have tools that help us do that quickly and easily). Whether you want to keep your current design or update to a new one, we can help – and we’ll make sure it looks great across devices of all screen sizes.