Is This the Beginning of the End For the Bespoke Website?

We are big fans of WordPress at Oinkodomeo®. No offense to any of the other fine CMS development systems available, we started with WordPress and have never found a reason to change. That said, our site oinkodomeo.com is a so-called “bespoke” website (after the old term “bespoke suit” a suit you had fitted and made to order). Oinkodomeo.com is actually a hybrid, it has a WordPress blog built in (look at Oinks and Rants) to a responsive hand-coded site.

Why bother? I admit one reason is just plain ego on my part, although I tell everyone (including Kathleen) that we want to show off our expertise should someone ever check out our source code and CSS (very, very unlikely). I guess the real reason is as an homage to the way we used to do development one site at a time, before WordPress and other CMS systems got so versatile and powerful. Today I can think of very few circumstances where a custom site is in the best interests of our Client, so this is probably the last one I will ever specify or build.

Does that mean I think that Web Developers are going the way of the dinosaur? Hardly. They will just move a little further up the food chain, building themes, frameworks and libraries that other people with broader skill sets will use to create Visitor-focused web experiences.

So we don’t have to mourn the passage of Developers, and we should not mourn the passage of the bespoke site. In the end, our website Visitor doesn’t care how it was build, he/she just wants a pleasant online experience while obtaining information, goods, services or entertainment. And that’s where we should keep our focus.