My friend was approached by a client who insisted that his website should be in WordPress to facilitate future maintainability.

That's how y'all end up having to maintain those awful pieces of mess. Blame the client, not the developer.

How would you suggest it be?

When my company wanted a new website I also suggested they use Wordpress for maintainability. They didn't listen and instead pay heaps to some design agency every time they want some small update.

For most websites surely they are more maintainable if they are built using cms or blogging software?

Software like Wordpress is known by many people, you don't need developer skills to update content, there are lots of out of the box themes and lots of cheap hosting options.

@spacem

If a company wants something richer than medium, but essentially still nothing more than a blog with a few static pages, options like WP or ghost are fine.

The problem is that most clients have hidden requirements. They want to pay little, but want e-commerce features in the future, then they want to deliver support through chat, then social integrations follow, then they want you to hook it up to some proprietary CRM system, etc.

Suddenly you're building something in WordPress using shitty bloated plugins and hacky code what you could have built much more elegantly from scratch in a framework.

There is a simple solution to such problems. I am the developer, you are the client, you pay me for my expertise and those expertise have made me allergic to wordpress so either we develop is something that is not a steaming pile of horse shit, of you find someone else to build you a polished ball of horse shit.

@RTRMS that's what I told my friend. But they're a very new company, and can't afford to turn clients away for now. I recommended making their own CMS instead, which could be tailored to each client.

@620hun Honestly that is a worse solution, the burden then falls on you as the company to then maintain the CMS, on top of that it needs to be taught to each new hire, which could take a considerable amount of time.

I know some devs do not care, but I know quite a few that will never go work for a company using proprietry systems, only expereinced dev's ready to find their retirement company do that, as a new dev working on something that absolutley nobody else uses or has even heard of does not benefit my career path.

There are quite a few better CMS's out there than wordpress that are far more stable, secure. There are a few very nice ones built on django/python.

Keystone is also very nice, built on Node, reada few reviews that pushed it as a great alternative to Wordpress, and being JS, finding devs to work on it will be easy and upskilling a breeze.

I actually used it's API config for a clients angular site, so it runs an admin only UI, giving you 100% control of the client facing aspects, and being able to build a real quality website while still giving them an Admin section to never log into.

@RTRMS I would be happy with Django, but he's a Laravel guy :P

@RTRMS keystone sounds interesting... I'm developing a web app (saas startup) myself and I need a promotional site for it with help/documentation, prices, about and promotional stuff. I don't want to have to spend time on the promotional site since I'm the sole programmer on my startup and have lots of pending features... Searching for a cheap (since I have no funding and pay for it from my pocket) place that can do it for me, I can't find anything other than WordPress...