Not every site needs to be a huge time investment to stand up. My main reservation for not taking on new projects is due to the immense amount of lead time it takes to get the core product working. However, there are times when it makes a world of difference to just use a CMS system such as WordPress to stand up something beautiful and extremely functional.
WordPress can be nothing short of amazing if your project parameters fit this mold and in this case it did. This was a simple project that managed online signups, collected the money, and managed media. It is not something that needs to scale, it does not need to be integrated into any other system and the staff who will manage this are not technical at nature, so I did not see any real reason to invest my time into building something from scratch.
I was able to stand this site up in a weekend and over the course of the next week, I simply worked on the design, user flows for signup and taught the users how to login and manage the competition. The best part of this was not the minimal time investment but how smart it made me look to them!!!
I feel like what this really bought me, and this event was the time to re-fine the vision, message and focus 100% on the coordination of the actual event.
We were able to achieve this because of the huge array of modules you can get for WordPress which played a role into simplifying the overall event such as modules for:
- Online Registration
- Payment Submissions and Reporting (for taxes)
- Team Management
- Notifications
- Media Management
This does not include all of the site design tools and other miscellaneous features. Now keep in mind, if you were to ask for all of these things and I told you that I could whip up a site in a weekend that can do all of this, you would probably call me a liar. Luckily, I am not a liar most of the times and this is the reality of where we are at today with CMS systems such as WordPress and how far the community has come with these tools.
