We have several years of experience with building websites with WordPress for clients. And indeed most of the clients seem to struggle with managing the content. Most of the problems occure with the wysiwyg editor and the media library. Mostly small stuff like disappearing new lines or the other way around. Even for me it's sometimes hard to figure out why the editor behaves unexpectedly. Try to make a decent bulleted list and then edit it. My personal rescue is the html view, but we can't expect that from the customer can we?
But give any unexperienced person a copy of Word and the struggle with the same problems. The difference is there are not that many client without experience with Word. They do that every day. They edit the website a few times a week tops. And when they try WP for the first time they expect it to be a hassle free ride. What I am trying to say is every piece of software you want to use in a good way you need to sit down for and put some effort in it. Sweat and curse just like we all did on Word and then you wil get used to it.
That being said there is always room for improvement in WP. Thanx for the post.
If you think you're going to make a custom web solution using Wordpress without training the customers, your project is doomed. That would apply to any site project. Replace WP in your post with whatever software you want and you'll end up with similar conclusions.
Please don't give the Wordpress project new ideas for ooh-shiny. Please. Just don't do that. Because they already do that incessantly instead of fixing bugs and cleaning up the festering rats nest of code it all staggers forward on.
Thanks for your thoughts. I agree that WordPress is very powerful from a sysadmin point of view. I also mention in my article that I'm not necessarily suggesting that things need to be fixed on the back end. However, from a Client front end editing perspective some things need to be made a lot simpler and easier.
Also, there need's to be a way for us as developers to create more complex layouts like 3-Column responsive designs, parallax scrolling sites etc.
I'll be sharing more of my ideas for WordPress and what we as designers/developers can do to help WordPress be a better solution for our Clients over the next several weeks.
I'm interested to hear what some of the code bugs are that need to be worked out.
According to Forbes, WordPress powers one of every 6 websites on the Internet, nearly 60 million in all, with 100,000 more popping up each day. But have you ever taken time to think about how WordPress manages content. Not only from an editing perspective but also from a design perspective.
This article has come about from years of experience with WordPress, talking and working with multiple Clients, and even being inspired from other innovative products – like Square. One of the things that really strikes me about Square is that they are so focused on their users. They are focused on completely rethinking how payments are done in order to make them beautiful and easy to use.
Let’s think about the WordPress Admin – is it focused on its users; is it easy to use; is it breathtaking? I think we’ll all agree that it could use some work in these areas.
But give any unexperienced person a copy of Word and the struggle with the same problems. The difference is there are not that many client without experience with Word. They do that every day. They edit the website a few times a week tops. And when they try WP for the first time they expect it to be a hassle free ride. What I am trying to say is every piece of software you want to use in a good way you need to sit down for and put some effort in it. Sweat and curse just like we all did on Word and then you wil get used to it.
That being said there is always room for improvement in WP. Thanx for the post.