I’ve spent most of the last month or two looking for ways to get some Statamic projects in my portfolio. You may notice that right now my services page doesn’t even list Statamic but don’t worry, its coming very soon. I quoted on two Statamic projects in the last month and have started two others, one for a new client, and one for a retainer client. You may be wondering why I seem desperate for Statamic projects, well let me tell you. I’ve been building WordPress sites since 2010 and still am working on them most days but the excitement of starting a new project on WordPress faded years ago. Anytime I get a chance to build a new online application that uses Laravel it just makes me happy to jump in and start coding. While Statamic is built on Laravel, it really brings together the best of both worlds that I have been working in for over a decade. Statamic offers the stability and beautiful code structure of Laravel core along with the ease of editing and site management that I’ve typically found in WordPress.
Let’s take a step back and talk about the type of work I end up doing for a lot of my clients. Most of my WordPress projects are adding new functionality to existing sites, attempting to improve the speed of those sites, or making changes to the visual style of sites. Site speed in WordPress can be a huge mountain to climb if the sites have any combination of the following: users logging in, plugins providing core functionality that load frontend scripts and styles, popular page builders (Elementor, Divi, etc) and prebuilt themes. I’m not saying it’s impossible to speed up WordPress sites, I’ve done it for many clients, but its rarely easy.
Statamic a creates a very clear separation between the structure of content types, the content, and the html template. And if you are using Tailwind then the html template really is also dictating your visual styling and you don’t have to manage what can be very complicated and bloated CSS stylesheets. I’ve wasted too many days trying to build Gutenberg blocks in React, syncing ACF fields from one site to another, or trying to edit content in the Elementor page builder. I want something that is fast, smart, and saves me time with an interface customized to the content and organizational needs of the client instead of just squishing square pegs into round holes over and over again. This new (to me) CMS is changing how I think about building sites and raises the level of quality I believe I can provide for my clients.
I’m sure I will write about this again very soon but now I want to get back to building this Statamic site that I’m working on for a local plumber. I’m not abandoning WordPress but expanding my knowledge base and services to include where I think my content management future should be headed. So if anyone is looking for a new site or wants to learn more about what we can do together with Statamic just hit me up.