Developers build websites using intricate code structures called frameworks. I know what you’re thinking…green code cascading down your screen Matrix-style. Unfortunately, it’s not that cool. A framework is just a bunch of code that looks something like this:
A small snippet of code from the Genesis Framework.
Once a framework has been built, you can apply a theme. Think of the framework as a skeleton, and the theme as a decorative skin. A website can look really beautiful, but if the framework is weak, your website is prone to myriad issues (depreciated functions, malware susceptibility, etc). Here are two common problems websites can encounter when their framework is weak:
I Updated a Theme and it Broke My Site
Anyone can create and sell a website theme. That means there’s a broad spectrum (see what I did there?) of quality accessible to buyers. Let’s say Chuck took a web design class in college. Chuck was pretty pleased with his creation and decided to capitalize on his new found hobby by selling it online. Meanwhile, Betty Sue from Iowa finds and buys Chuck’s theme for her handmade soap business. Betty Sue thinks this new theme is exactly what she’s looking for. It’s modern, responsive, has an e-commerce feature, and even shows a Twitter feed!
Flash forward 2 years. Chuck has switched majors and is now pursuing a career in poetry. As a result, he hasn’t been updating his theme code. Whoopsie. Several of the plugins he integrated into the theme have stopped working altogether. WordPress has updated its core code, but Chuck’s theme isn’t able to adapt correctly. Betty Sue updates her WordPress platform to find her entire website askew. Her logo is 5x too big, her soap products aren’t displaying correctly, and she’s being inundated with SPAM. Due to Chuck’s negligence as a theme developer, Betty Sue is now in a terrible position (having built her entire business around a website with a weak framework). Poor Betty Sue could have avoided this whole mess by purchasing the Genesis Framework with a beautiful theme.
Here’s how Betty Sue would have been better off with a Genesis site: “You could radically change the look of your site every week if you wanted to, and you’d never hurt your search engine rankings … because your design functions are kept completely separate from the core code.”
Sluggish Page Speed
Let’s do something fun and check out Google Page Speed Insights. This is a free tool from Google that assesses the web performance of your site. When dealing with website speed, there will always be a delay. Our job as website developers is to optimize your site in a way that maximizes page speed without making design concessions. If you’re interested in learning more about page speed, I recommend reading an article from MachMetrics Speed Blog called Average Page Load Times for 2018.
The Genesis Framework is designed to optimize page speed, which makes our job a helluva lot easier: “Nothing slows down a site like bloated code, but we obsess about making Genesis cleaner and more lightweight. Web page load times are usually discussed in seconds, but page load times for sites built on Genesis can often be measured and discussed in milliseconds. And today, that’s an essential difference.”
Why We Use the Genesis Framework
Over the past few years, Spectrum has been building websites exclusively using the Genesis Framework. This has resulted in faster, more secure websites for our clients and more peace of mind for our developers. The company that created Genesis, StudioPress, is a reliable, respectable company dedicated to continuous improvement of their product. Learn more about the Genesis Framework >