Website software

Shopify is really fantastic software for building ecommerce sites - sites that sell products online - but it's not the right choice for every ecommerce site. One of it's most popular alternatives is WordPress with its WooCommerce system.

Shopify has many positives, and the first is that it's very easy to use. If you have your product information all organised with a folder of pictures ready, you can build a Shopify site by yourself in a couple of hours if you keep it really simple. Shopify is also really reliable and safe website software, meaning that you'll almost never find any bugs in the software, and it won't be hacked. Lastly, Shopify is quite flexible, with thousands of themes to choose from, and thousands of "apps" (plugins) to extend the site with new features.

For most businesses, the biggest downside of Shopify is its cost. Shopify charges a reasonable monthly charge - depending on which tier you choose - along with taking a percentage of all sales, ranging from 0.5% to 2%, also depending on the tier chosen. Lastly, Shopify is a little less flexible than WordPress with WooCommerce, because it focusses on just ecommerce sites, instead of more complex sites that have an ecommerce section.

If you'd like a Shopify site, feel free to contact us to chat about it.

Drupal is great software for building websites, and it's popular among large businesses and institutions because of that. But it's not the best tool for every type of site.

On the positive side, Drupal is free and can be made really easy to use for the website owners and content managers. It's well known to be incredibly secure (typically more secure than WordPress for example). Drupal is great for building websites with lots of types of content, such as events, products, team members, organisation profiles, publications, etc. Lastly, it's very flexible because of the large number of community modules (plugins).

Drupal's biggest downside is that it can be a bit more difficult to learn than the alternatives, so it's often not used by people making their first website.

Check out our full comparison between Drupal and its alternatives.

WordPress is great software for building websites, and it's super popular because of that. But it's not the best tool for every type of site.

On the positive side, WordPress is free, and it's fairly easy to use when you first install it. It's quite easy to improve a WordPress website with new features by adding plugins, and an updated design by finding and adding a new theme. It's also great for ecommerce sites with the WooCommerce plugin.

But WordPress can get really messy and bloated when you add many plugins, and it's not great for sites with lots of types of content, such as events, products, team members, organisation profiles, publications, etc.

Check out our full comparison between WordPress and its alternatives.