It looks as if I’m going to have to throw away my $3,750 investment in WordPress. If you don’t already know the answers, then you aren’t smart enough to ask any questions. But WordPress is its own closed community that does not tolerate beginners. I have never had problems locating the help forums for any other software application. THERE AREN’T ANY FORUMS!!!!! Perhaps this is another case of the “hidden user interface elements”. I start clicking on every link I can find, but I’m just going around in circles. There’s only one problem: there aren’t any links to any forums. I browse around, looking at all the different warnings, advisories, and options. There are lots of different forums for different needs and interests. There are some introductory pages laying out the basic reminders we all know: no obscenity, no smut, no spam, be nice, etc. So I go to the WordPress website, scout around, and eventually find the gateway to the forums. I’m sure that somebody there has an answer.” sez I. “I’ll just run over to their community forums and ask for help. ![]() “I’ll bet there’s an easy solution to this second problem” sez I. This one failure renders WordPress unusable for me.Īs I have said, there are a great many other outrages against good design in WordPress, but now I’ll skip to the coup de grace. Apparently the geniuses behind WordPress have never heard of “user interface design”. In fact, EVERYBODY uses this basic scheme for presenting information organized in a tree. This is how it’s done in the Macintosh Finder, but Windows and Unix use exactly the same design. Here we have a portion of the page showing broken links: I could list dozens of cosmically stupid things about WordPress, but I’ll mention just two here.įirst: the magical, mystical “hidden user interface element” I suspected that I would have problems with WordPress when I got started, so I kept a log of problems I was experiencing, but I gave up on that log after just 48 hours - it was already absurdly long. ![]() (MacWrite and MacPaint were the first two applications for the Mac, released in January 1984.) In terms of user-friendliness, WordPress makes Microsoft Word look like MacWrite, and Adobe Photoshop look like MacPaint. What a pile of crap WordPress is! In all my years working with many different applications, I have never encountered such a badly designed monstrosity. When she turned it over to me eleven days ago, I eagerly set to work learning how to make WordPress do its stuff. It was a huge job and I paid her thousands of dollars for the work. So I located an experienced WordPress developer to convert my website –all 1500+ pages– to WordPress format. After all, 5 million websites can’t be wrong - right? ![]() After much research, I finally settled on WordPress. Realizing that it was only a matter of time before Sandvox became obsolete, I resolved to find a new platform. In a previous essay (“ Whither This Poor Pilgrim“), I described the quandary I faced when I realized that the company behind my website platform (Sandvox) had gone out of business.
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