
WordPress is not easy - gmays
https://mattreport.com/wordpress-is-not-easy/
======
codingdave
No software is easy if you are not using it for its intended purpose. The fact
that small businesses like to twist WordPress into a CMS for brochureware
sites does not mean that WordPress is the best tool for that job. So if a
WordPress consultant is finding problems using WordPress, rather than say
WordPress is too hard, they should find a better tool for the job at hand.

And if you are teaching a group of new business owners how to get a web
presence, maybe you should first determine their needs before declaring self-
hosted WordPress to be the correct answer for an entire group.

Because WordPress really is easy if you are using it for a blog, as it was
originally designed.

Don't let many years of feature bloat distract you from its original intent -
that path leads to disappointment.

~~~
zenincognito
I agree to this response.

I had a barely competent lawn mover talk to me about a website and after 30
minutes of discussion was able to get a smallorange hosting , use the script
installer , watch some videos and was able to set up a nice little website.

He did make a couple of phone calls to me in the middle but in less than a day
he was setup. After pointing to themeforest he now has a website that
developers charge 3-4K for.

Wordpress is really easy and if the audience is not competent utilizing it
then maybe a network hosted like wix seem an alternative.

Not sure if this demands a discussion.

~~~
x5n1
Each one of those themes nets its developer anywhere from $25,000 to $350,000.
So yes it makes sense for him to sell it for $50. Then you come to me and want
some customizations done. Well those customizations are going to cost you at
least $1,000, if not $3,000 to $5,000. You know why? Because I want to make my
$75,000 per year. You don't like it, do it yourself. It's so easy a monkey
could do it!

The value is not in how much time I spend doing it. The value is in the 10
years I spent learning how to do it. If you can find someone in India to do it
for cheaper, then don't come to me. Period. Seen plenty of freelancer.com
brilliance out there. That's what you deserve.

~~~
zenincognito
I am not sure what your hostility stems from ?

The author is talking about Wordpress not being easy. You are wrong in that
the developer nets $25K per theme. Most of these themes have less than 100
sales so a $50 theme nets less than $5000 for the developer.

Further to that most of these themes now have a very good customizer so even
your average Joe can customize it to their liking.

The discussion is absolutely not about value. Its about the author talking
about wordpress not being easy. Amazon AWS is not easy and yet they have
managed to increase their revenue. If a non technical person can set-up a
wordpress and be able to use it then truly it has done a good job of being
easy.

~~~
x5n1
That's one aspect of it. The other aspect of it that because the developer is
charging $3,000 - $5,000 they are doing something wrong that the user can do
themselves for $50. This sort of mentality creates a toxic market for WP
developers. It's fine for people to do it for $50, it's not fine to go around
spreading this toxic rhetoric that the developers charging $3000-$5000 are
ripping people off. And that's what I read OP's comment as saying and that's
what the hostility is directed at.

~~~
zenincognito
Again you are being hostile to your own perception and what you think you are
reading.

I did not say the developers were ripping people off. I did not even talk
about the value the developers provide. You assumed that I was talking about
developers ripping people off which in some way reflects your own inferiority
complex about this issue. I read the previous response and neither is that
person saying what you are perceiving.

------
CM30
On another note, the first few points all being web hosting related make me
think about how much of an utter pain hosting is in general. Seriously, the
hosting world has to be the most screwed up part of the internet, especially
when it comes down to jumping through the hoops put in place by different
companies and shopping around in an industry where everyone seems to be trying
to rip off everyone else.

But I'd say WordPress itself is pretty easy, at least if you're sticking to
well known plugins and the core features. Just needs to have the options and
text reworded a bit to make things a bit clearer for someone who's never used
a CMS before.

~~~
x5n1
what is this "rip people off" non-sense. you mean make money. that's what
everyone should be doing.

hosting is a race to the bottom sort of business. if someone can create some
value in it and charge money from the consumer, they are not doing anything
wrong and should be applauded.

~~~
CM30
Have you looked for hosting recommendations recently? It's a huge line of
affiliate sites pretending to be neutral while giving good reviews to whoever
pays them the most.

And then there's EIG, which basically buys out everything in sight, pretends
they're still independent and cuts costs at every opportunity.

Not to mention the people starting up hosting companies in the summer
holidays, only to run them into the ground or shut down in a few months.

There's a difference between making money and trying to trick people with
shoddy products and services.

~~~
x5n1
Don't see this as tricking, it's marketing. EIG offers hosting for next to
nothing, and you get what you pay for. If you customer wants to pay for value
hosting they can find it by paying more. The other players you are talking
about, I don't know how they get customers... it's not easy to get hosting
customers, period.

~~~
CM30
Well, they don't like telling anyone they bought out their provider, nor that
it's the cause of a previously good service going downhill. The company buys
out hosts offering a decent service at (sometimes) higher prices, then turns
them into budget providers with low reliability while trying to keep the news
on the low.

As for how the other guys get customers... Deals usually. Sometimes literally
on web hosting forums, where they talk advantage of the offers section til
they inevitably get banned.

------
llamataboot
I'm going to be contrary I guess, and say that Wordpress is too easy. That is,
it has grown to almost a full scale PHP framework, so to make it do anything
other than be a blog engine, you have to know a fair amount of front end, a
little bit of backend, you have to know all the crap that Wordpress chooses to
store in the db instead of in config files, etc etc. At this point, Wordpress
is a great tool for developers, and a great tool for the no-coding user that
just wants to set up a blog site or a brochure site based on a theme without
updating that theme. It's the middle ground where it gets dangerous. People
that don't know CSS but want to change colors using various plugins, etc etc
etc. For a "no code" website, I'd almost always recommend people go with
something like squarespace these days and just accept its limitations.
Otherwise, Wordpress is fine for developers.

------
Raed667
If you need a WordPress and don't have the technical knowledge to set it up,
there are plenty of hosting providers that will give you a one-click ready to
go set-up (using some sort of panel).

This takes care of 2/3rds of the issues you raised.

If you want to make a web-page without web knowledge, you can buy a theme that
has drag and drop features (this takes care of the rest)

------
mrmondo
Know what's even harder? Drupal. Drupal makes it easy to do the wrong thing,
over complicates trivial tasks and a fundamentally flawed core and the
community has a huge presence of 'expert beginners'.

All CMS are hard, I always recommend a static site and loading in whatever
dynamic content services you truly need.

~~~
lightlyused
How about some facts. What is the wrong thing? Which trivial tasks? What are
the fundamental flaws?

Expert beginners? You mean humans trying to answer poorly worded questions?

Learning new things can be hard from some people, but generalizations that all
of any type of software is hard make me sad. That being said, I've switched
people from wordpress to Drupal, mostly by asking them what they want to do in
the future, then showing them how it eventually is the road to having to pay
for features. That is usually enough to convince them that Drupal is the right
choice or a custom solution is better.

------
krmmalik
I wrote a post on the same thing a year ago. I agree with you all the way. I
had a lot of criticism for my post though. It seems those who rely heavily on
WordPress for their income struggled with the bitter truth. At the time
however, I found it difficult recommend a solid alternative. I haven't tried
squarespace personally but I have no doubt it's a worthy alternative.
Personally I discovered Webflow and must admit I've never looked back since.
I've recommended it to a few others who are also really happy with it.

------
danso
Anything about the web is not easy. A few years ago I was walking students
through the steps of creating a S3 bucket so that they could stash web files
and see them live...here's the web tutorial I created for them:

[http://www.smalldatajournalism.com/projects/one-
offs/using-a...](http://www.smalldatajournalism.com/projects/one-offs/using-
amazon-s3/)

Note that I didn't go over things like, "What is S3", or "What is AWS"...or
even web domain hosting, or even "What is HTML". It simply involved making a
quickie HTML file and uploading it to S3 via the AWS web panel, and then
visiting the URL...being able to put something on the web of their complete
creation (rather than through a CMS) is pretty revelatory for newbies.

So where did people get stuck? Some people didn't have an Amazon account yet.
Easy enough, they created one. But then one student had a hell of a time just
getting into AWS. Hearing her describe her problems, I had no idea what she
was talking about. Then I watched as she tried to log in...well, you know how
Amazon, like most modern services, allow you to use email addresses as your
username? That greatly simplifies things, as most of us would agree...but for
some novices, they don't realize that logging in on
`my.personal.account@gmail.com` on Amazon (nevermind AWS) is not the same as
doing it for `my.personal.account@gmail.com` on _GMail_.

How does such a person survive on the modern Web, where emails are generally
used as the user ID? I'm guessing they just have been blithely reusing GMail
credentials for all their other accounts which they use their GMail address as
their user ID.

This doesn't have much to directly do with the complexity of creating a site
via a CMS, perhaps....except that if you're a veteran web developer, it's very
very difficult to imagine what is confusing to a novice...We think that
Wordpress is easy compared to say, Drupal...sure...but that's not the level of
thinking that novices work at. For them, it's more, "Where do I write my
program that makes the website?", and all of the fallacies and ambiguities
that question entails.

That said...not sure why the author has to care about anything beyond how to
set up things for Wordpress.org. If we're talking newbies here, let them use
the vanilla Wordpress.org, and then let them worry about self-hosting later.

~~~
abustamam
I had a similar experience volunteering for Rails Bridge a few months ago:

[http://www.railsbridge.org/](http://www.railsbridge.org/)

Once we got everything installed, which was a nightmare in itself ("no, Dave,
you do not copy the quotes in"), we had to deal with actual "web" stuff.

Me: "Alright guys, refresh your browser to see your changes!"

Student 1: "What's the 'browser?'" Student 2: "How do I refresh?" Student 3:
"Why can't I go to any websites?" (they were typing the URL in the command
line)

I took for granted the technical environment I grew up in; most people don't
even know how to use the software they use every day to browse Facebook. And I
don't blame them, they don't teach this stuff in school.

------
jrs235
I think WordPress gets pushed so much is because most of the pushers are
Marketing/Design firms that are heavy on the marketing and design and light on
technical knowledge and programming. To these marketing firms, they "know"
WordPress. It's their hammer. So everything that a [small] business needs
that's remotely related to presenting information or collecting information
digitally then WordPress is their nail. I ran into a "marketing"
person/company that had setup a WordPress site for an organization. I was
brought in to add some more advanced functionality and technical expertise. I
wanted to make use of Cloudflare and asked this person to modify their name
servers to use the ones assigned by Cloudflare. They went dark. I don't think
they have a clue beyond getting WordPress installed via CPanel, installing
themes, adding some plugins they tend to use, and editing some things here and
there via WordPress admin. That's the other thing that drives me nuts about
WordPress... they are a bazillion plugins and everybody has their favorites
they use to do various things. Some use plugin x for caching, some use y. Some
use visual editor n, others use m... etc. It's maddening.

~~~
nickysielicki
Not to mention, those plugins are a potential security risk.

[http://www-personal.umich.edu/~markmont/awp/](http://www-
personal.umich.edu/~markmont/awp/)

------
kayamon
You can go straight to wordpress.com and click "Create Website". Or if you
want to take a more complicated route and go self-hosted, go to Dreamhost and
select the WordPress 1-click install.

It literally is that easy. To write an article containing "So it took you two
weeks to finally get the famous five-minute install finished" is just stupid.

I don't care much for WordPress, but the one thing you can't deny about it is
that it's easy to install.

------
brendonjohn
Lets use the vocabulary proposed by Rich Hickey.

Wordpress is _complex_ and is not _simple_. Wordpress is certainly _easy_ if
you have taken the time to learn Wordpress, but this understandably isn't the
case for the honey bee entrepreneurs.

------
pan69
For some people it just comes down to expectations, everything today is
supposed to be trivial since everyone seems to be launching websites and
startups all over the place and becoming gazillionaires overnight. Out of the
off-the-self software systems out there, WordPress is pretty easy to use for
someone with the right experience. However, somehow we expect two ladies who
want to sell honey online to be able to set up a WordPress site.

The thing with content management systems isn't that it makes it easy for just
anyone to use it, it makes it really easy for experts to use it. I.e. I've
built countless on WordPress sites for clients over the years because they
want to be able to maintain it themselves, but when push comes to shove, they
update their site every 6 or so months which means they have to relearn how
thing works over and over again. They just ask me to update it for them, and
because it's WordPress, it's super easy for me.

------
ollybee
Wordpress is not easy for an amateur but that's missing the point. It has
driven down the cost of website development. Cheap cookie cutter Wordpress
sites by budget developers are good enough for very many people.

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gazby
Most of us (particularly small business owners) pay someone to do their taxes
right? If you took the time to learn the tax code, you could do your own. Same
deal here. In the end I think it boils down to a matter of priorities.

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vatotemking
> What’s a page vs a post?

Spot on. This confused the hell outta me when I was newbie. I think it would
be a lot easier if its just using an "everything is just a web page with a
URL" paradigm.

~~~
coldtea
That would just move the confusion to: "how can I make some pages show in a
time-based list and keep others fixed?". At some point you need to learn about
static pages vs blog pages / posts, because /about_us and /company/blog
behaves differently.

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forgotAgain
From the blog name I presumed it was affiliated with Matt Mullenweg. Not so,
it's from another guy named Matt.

~~~
brokentone
Matt Mullenweg's blog can be found at: ma.tt

There are a number of people on the Internet named Matt, many who do various
things on wordpress even!

