Simon, you’re absolutely right.
Yes they do…many issues!
My agency builds in Rapidweaver and WordPress. Some (usually larger) clients want WordPress because they have a team of people who all need access to the website. WordPress is great for this: you can give various staff different levels of access to make the changes they need. Nevertheless, they need to know what they are doing or the website will quickly deteriorate with poor layout, oversize images and so on.
Most clients however want to get on with running their business and leave web design to the professionals. For these clients we build in Rapidweaver where they get super fast, low maintenance sites with simple editing available for frequently changed areas if required (Easy/Total CMS, GoCMS and the others mentioned above.)
Out of the box, WordPress is a cumbersome beast with sluggish performance and masses of routine updates to plug-ins, theme and Wordpress itself. It is not uncommon for one plug-in update to conflict with another and bring the site down. All this considerably ups the hosting / maintenance costs. Not to mention the caching required to improve performance that brings its own problems with some plugins. Even with Litespeed server / caching, our WordPress sites are consistently slower than the Rapidweaver ones.
As for Wix and SquareSpace - the basics are easy enough, but unless your clients have a talent for it and time to learn, it is extremely easy to get amateur looking results. Also, we have a modest income stream from hosting which we would lose if we built on these platforms. A business no-no for us!
If you have a client that wants to go DIY - let them. see what they come up with. Some will do well others won’t. I suspect there are enough businesses / organisations who want to hand over the website to someone else.
It’s not talk, but it’s the same issue all complex and well known (software-) products are faced with. If RW would be popular as WP, we might be facing similar challenges: at the end, we don’t know what the stacks we use export in the final site.
Of course, because WP is a database driven content management system and RW exports (by default) static HTML. That’s the point. All RW features are built in WP (more ore less). This comes with a price. I personally don’t understand why ppl still compare WP and RW? Totally different use cases and approaches.
Not sure I get your point? Just because the two are different use cases doesn’t mean the pros and cons shouldn’t be compared. On the plus side, multiple users can not only amend content, but also further develop their WP site. On the minus side getting a snappy-fast site is a lot more involved, and there is a lot more maintenance required. Armed with this information, a potential site owner can make an informed decision as to what suits them best. I go through this comparison with all our clients - seems like a good idea to me!
Well, you always can check how the final code looks like selecting ‘view source’ some clients needs a clean html/css files and I exported the site on a folder and clean the files accordingly.
I have a client that assigned multiple employees to work with the website. I use Armadillo Stacks and it work great for them. Again, I also did a training on his company so they can work with it. Believe it or not, hundreds of questions wordpress related from all of them.
How do you clean them up?
By hand or with an app?
I’m still looking for an easy and quick way to remove all comments from the published html
Yes - easily done with any RW CMS but user-creation of new pages, layout and sections is another matter altogether.
I use Espresso but I think any good editor has a find and replace option built in. I use a plugin that let me settle all code perfectly and even compressed them to eliminate unnecessary coding.