Webvanta for WordPress Users

A New World of Power and Flexibility

WordPress, which started out as a blog system, has grown into one of the most popular CMS systems among designers. It's available in a limited form as a free hosted service, at www.wordpress.com, and as open-source software.

WordPress Is Best When

Webvanta Is Best When

Your site is blog-like and uses tags to organize everything You have a richer information architecture in mind
 
You can get by with the limitations of the hosted version, or cope with hosting the open-source version yourself You like the idea of having lots of flexibility with the simplicity of a hosted service
 
You want full access to all the software running on your server, and you're willing to keep it all updated and secure You'd prefer to have professional programmers keep everything updated and secure
 
You get a thrill from the text message on your phone at 1 am telling you that your server is down You like the idea of someone else being responsible for keeping the server running
 
You enjoy setting up backups and recovery plans, and making sure they run properly, indefinitely. You'd like the peace of mind that comes from knowing that everything is properly backed up, on- and off-site

WordPress is easy to get started with, especially if you use the hosted version. To gain full flexibility, though, you need to use the downloaded version, and deal with hosting it yourself. And if you fully customize it, you need to deal with PHP code.

Webvanta offers a hosted solution that is just as simple as WordPress.com to set up but gives you a dramatically more powerful site. You can implement  a rich information architecture, with custom database structures, without programming.

You can use the same tools you use today to create designs in HTML and CSS. Then deploy that code on Webvanta, and easily integrate the CMS and database capabilities. There's no rigid theme system whose structure you need to adapt to: Webvanta fits into your code, not the other way around.

If your site consists of a blog and/or a handful of static pages, WordPress is a good solution. Webvanta is designed for sites that need more structure and more flexibility. Without any programming, you can have a taxonomy of hierarchical categories, pages that aggregate information across subcategories, and a customized database structure that matches your site's information needs.

Webvanta is a hosted, managed service. You'll never again have to worry about security patches, upgrades, backups, site monitoring, scaling, or system administration. You create the content and design for your site, and we deliver it, with a reliable, flexible back-end system that you can customize easily through our web-based control panel.

Getting the Best Value from Open Source

Webvanta is built on a foundation of open-source software: Ruby on Rails, Linux, MySQL, Nginx, Blueprint CSS, jQuery, and dozens of smaller packages.

Webvanta's system builds upon these open-source tools to give you a fully integrated, supported environment that abstracts away all the complexity of those technologies. Read more about our technology stack.

When working with an open-source content management system, such as Wordpress or Drupal, designers can benefit from a large community and thousands of extensions.

This cornocopia of choice has its drawbacks, however:

  • When the core software gets updated, compatibility with existing extensions is sometimes compromised.
  • There's often no support available for extensions, and you're on your own to make sure all the pieces work together.
  • You're on your own to keep up with security patches, make sure your database is frequently backed up, and keep everything running 24/7.

Read more about how Webvanta compares with open-source content management systems.