How do you present WordPress to a designer who is afraid?

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I have two groups of talented designers that I am trying to nudge away from doing Dreamweaver sites — AKA static pages that are based on “templates” — and toward WordPress. In both cases I have encountered what I can only describe as fear.

This fear seems to be based on (a) a concern that they won’t be able to “cut it” in this new world, and (b) that if they are “just” doing the main templates (and not all of the generated pages) they will lose billable hours.

I think (a) is a matter of education and I’m working on it, but (b) is harder to answer. I believe that they will be able to address oft-stated customer requests for “editable websites,” and that they will be able to bid on sites that require more functionality and dynamic interaction with the user than they have dealt with in the past.

Question: Does anyone have any studies / examples / success stories / whatever that I can use to show them that WP may actually be a major step forward in their ability to find and please customers? It is important that these be from a designer’s point of view. Some of this will be anecdotal, but I’m hoping for something more … concrete.

After thought:  I wish I could give out more than one Correct . I felt a bit stupid when I saw case studies because that should have been one of the first things I searched on. I liked the comment about The Loop because it gave me a little insight from a designer’s point of view about what might be intimidating. I’m going to look for more of those.

Addressing The Fear is a bit more difficult because fear, by it’s very nature, is not purely rational. Many people have been deeply traumatized by the recession — watching your billables drop by 75-80% overnight through no fault of your own can make you really nervous about anything changing. I saw this in my parents, who were in their 20’s during the Great Depression; fifty years later they still had a sense of scarcity in the world.

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Why not just ask them to estimate how much it will cost to change the layout for 600+ pages. And then ask them if they think their customer will pay for that, versus a designer using WordPress.

One important thing to point out is that Dreamweaver is a tool on your computer for creating the design. WordPress is a CMS for maintain content. You still need Dreamweaver (or whatever you like to write code in) to design new templates.

And ask them this:
Are they designers? Or web administrators? Because if a customer only want’s to add news articles, then he should not need a desigenr to to this.

Here is an example. Go to freyaolsen.com. This site is currently using static HTML.
Now, If I want to add a new news, I have to do the following:

  1. Add a new html page for the news page
  2. Change front page to display recent news
  3. Make sure that the 50 or so other news items have updated also this month section

I don’t event use Dreamweaver for this, I use notepad!

And I’m not doing point 3 because a) it will cost to much for the customr and b) a dynamic site is on it’s way. Once dynamic, it will only take 10 minutes to write a new article and not the 4 hours updating each HTML page.

And what if I need to change the menu? Then I have to change the menu on every single page. And that is a lot of pages.

Another valid poiont is that if they focus on designing tempaltes, they will use less timne on each project, and thus have time for new projects.

case studies
I googled and found many case studies. Just look through them and see if you find one that is simple to follow.

Good luck.

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