At TFM&A I made a statement to @jakeisonline that I now wish to retract. It’s something I’ve been saying for over a year now due to a bad experience. Chatting to Jake, I mentioned that I found WordPress frustrating and I have been known to say around the office that in fact I hate WordPress. A pretty strong statement you’ll agree. However I am wrong. This weekend, after some education, I have learnt that I do not hate WordPress. In fact, I am starting to appreciate WordPress’ capabilities. It is however badly thought out and designed WordPress websites that I do indeed hate.
“Why?” you might ask, for I am hoping you are confused as to what horrible experience with WordPress should lead me to such a conclusion. Well in answer, I have been working with a website which has been built using WordPress CMS for almost a year now and have regularly felt like I was banging my head against a brick wall at the limitations to the design. As this was my first experience of WordPress I assumed, wrongly, that this was typical of WordPress in general. The templates, navigation and secondary navigation of this website felt fundamentally at odds, restrictive and clunky. Wanting to figure out how, or rather if, I could improve the general flow of this website and add additional functionality with WordPress plugins I showed the site to @danshilcock.
@danshilcock had shown me a site he had been working on, in WordPress, which made me think that there was something very wrong with the site I was working with. The simple logic of the navigation and page relationships that Dan was showing me was something I needed. Now WordPress seemed simple, intuitive, and based on sound logic. So what was wrong with my site?
Fundamentally, the site I was working with had not taken advantage of the intuitive nature of WordPress when it was built. The designers had hardcoded the navigation into the homepage template, as well as a box of secondary navigation as a list further down the page. The flexible use of categories and blog rolls within WordPress had been lost. If I want to increase the functionality of the website I am unable to fully utilise the WordPress CMS due to the restrictive design imposed upon the site from conception.
I don’t hate WordPress, I just wish the website I have taken on was designed in such a way that it could take advantage of what WordPress has to offer.
If any web developers out there want to get in touch about improving a WordPress site please feel free!
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Cat, I'd be intrigued to know what you think of the default Wordpress.com setups - I would guess that a lot of people use that style of blog / site since it's easy to just click a few options and have a blog without needing to install anything. I admit I've modified mine quite a lot and added pages etc. I wonder if the Wordpress folks need to have a bit of a rethink around the defaults?
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