Selecting a high-performance technology for my website was no simple task.
It involved a lot of research, inspecting radar sites, reading articles, & watching developer videos, combined with my previous experiences using web technologies to discover & decide on the “Fantastic Four” (WordPress, Bricks, ACSS & Frames) system.
WordPress is the most widely used Content Management System (CMS) known for it’s intuitive interface, many plugins for customisation, scalability for small blogs & large corporate sites, SEO optimisation, affordability, & large support community.
It’s estimated to power 60% of CMS websites worldwide, & its affordability comes from being an open-source platform (free to use) with many free themes & plugins available for new entrepreneurs.
“WordPress quality is that good many famous entrepreneurs and big-name brands trust it for their websites.”
Here are a few examples:
- Matt Mullenweg: The co-founder of WordPress itself runs several of his businesses through WordPress, including his company Automattic;
- Kevin Geary: The founder of Digital Gravy Web Design Agency, & WordPress Plugins Automatic CSS & Frames for his business & personal websites;
- Tony Robbins: The renowned life coach & motivational speaker, runs his blog & content through WordPress;
- Richard Branson: The founder of the Virgin Group uses WordPress for his personal blog, where he shares his thoughts & adventures;
- Arianna Huffington: The co-founder of The Huffington Post utilises WordPress for her new venture, Thrive Global, which focuses on wellness & productivity.
WordPress is well supported with security & technical updates (multiple per year), & it’s market share is growing, so you can be confident it will be around in ten years from now.
“I find WordPress efficient to use for updating websites & adding features (via plugins), & it was the technology I used for a Business School Research Blog.”
It’s a smart decision to choose WordPress (self-hosted) as you get a professional platform with maximum flexibility for customisations to suit individual needs & budgets.
After the WordPress decision, there were three choices I found for WordPress Builders, Bricks, Cwicly, or Oxygen – that provided pro features, could output quality code, assist semantic web standards, & enable DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) development.
It was important for me to find a WordPress Theme & Builder, that was going to enhance semantic web standards, facilitate importing unstyled sections & components, & enable custom design with DRY development.
I selected Bricks as it was recommended by Kevin Geary, a leading developer who demonstrated the advantages of using Bricks in videos, highlighting clean code output.
Its a powerful builder which facilitates creating websites using a visual tab (drag & drop) interface, & a comprehensive options panel to add content, styling, & queries.
“Bricks is your all-in-one tool kit for customising websites, as it does the heavy lifting (HTML, PHP, & CSS) for you via the dashboard controls.”
It has a parent & child theme, making customisations possible by activating the child theme, & its features enhance semantic standards.
Beware not all builders are equal – it’s important to ensure you’re using a pro builder that outputs clean code & Semantic Markup, without overloading pages with excessive code.
Kevin’s tutorials inspired me to do his free Website Building 101 Course – which uses Bricks & I can recommend it for anyone who wants to learn about high-performance websites.
“By activating the child theme in WordPress, my website customisations are safely stored in the child theme which overrides the parent theme.”
This acts as a safety barrier for each update of the parent theme (multiple per year), and ensures there are no breakdowns from my customisations to the child theme.
Bricks provides an intuitive dashboard, it supports sections & components, & outputs HTML, PHP & CSS scripts that enhance semantic web standards via automatic tagging.
After using Bricks for more than a year I can say from experience how happy I am with the builder & theme for doing the heavy lifting when constructing customised websites.
Another reason why Bricks is so good, is its ability to integrate smoothly with third-party systems like Automatic CSS & Frames that add styling & pre-built structure to web pages.
These systems are liked by developers for their efficiency, scalability, & maintainability.
What I like about ACSS & Frames the most, is their ability to be used by non-developers & regular people like you & I through the Bricks builder dashboard.
“Automatic CSS (ACSS) by Kevin Geary is a cascading style sheet utility framework for WordPress that speeds-up workflow, & makes it easier to style a website.”
You get the benefit of an entire large CSS framework to use, which was a large project undertaken by Kevin to help his agency become more efficient with styling websites.
With ACSS presets you can reference or adjust colors, shades, & transparencies, using the framework’s utility classes & simple variables from the dashboard inside Bricks builder.
The plugin helps to apply consistent spacing across a website via utility classes (padding, margin, column, rows) for visual rhythm, which is based on mathematical scales.
ACSS provides perfect consistency with global colors, shades, spacing, & typography across an entire website, which can enhance your brand images, colours & recognition.
Features include one source of truth for global styling with tokens, responsive grids & columns using Flex-Grid, & right-click menus to see the style classes & variables.
“Frames is a system of pre-built sections & components for wireframing, structuring, & developing websites using DRY practices with WordPress page builders.”
It speeds up your wireframing & development workflow so you can build beautiful websites in half the time without having to code any page structure.
If you’re thinking why do I need to wireframe, & isn’t it more efficient to use an existing web page template – which has been styled?
The answer is no. It’s more efficient to build with unstyled sections & components, so you’re not undoing pre-existing web page styling & then restyling for new brand colours.
Frames empowers custom design, provides technical superiority with HTML, PHP & CSS, accessibility, and enables DRY development best practices.
It’s focussed on functionality for maximum efficiency, technical code quality, & ease of styling, & it’s powered by ACSS for perfect code consistency, responsiveness, & flexibility.
Each element has a BEM-organised class ready for styling, allowing multiple element styling simultaneously, & grids use CSS Grid, instead of the less efficient Flexbox layouts.
The DOM structure follows HTML5 & A11y (accessibility) best practices, & spacing is controlled with gap & utility classes for global adjustments across components.
How do you find the “Fantastic Four” (WordPress, Bricks, ACSS, & Frames) web system?
It ticks my boxes for a user-friendly CMS system, that’s affordable & highly customisable for a marketing guy!
Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.
