A Designers Nightmare
To design a site in WordPress, you have to dig REAL DEEP into sites like Reddit to find answers to the simplest tasks. Thanks Reddit people!
Even to make a simple blog post, it’s hard to instantly find the button to create a new post, or find in the dashboard menu where to write posts. It just appears as plain text like everything else on the page. Sure you learn it over time, but hire a UX designer and make it intuitive.
If you search how to do anything, you get a bunch of people wanting to sell you their plugins to do a simple task. (Plugins are not allowed on the personal plan btw, you have to upgrade) (And, forget changing fonts & font sizes – the very basic things anyone wants to do with a website.) (Also the footer, sure, powered by WordPress is acceptable, adding the “proudly” is an overstatement that shouldn’t be forced onto your paying customers. There are seven other phrases to choose from, and none of them work, it defaults back to this one.)
Featured images, buried in right sidebar.
Inline images, buried in left sidebar.
Editing the entire site layout is a whole different deal.
Total maddening CF. The backend of wordpress feels like something written in 1995, then instead of changing the interface to something delightfully easy to use, they kept adding code on top of code until now you have an incredibly bloated beast of a backend.
A “Subscribe” button appears at the bottom of my website.
This is not for my own email list (which I can’t add a form without a plugin and I can’t add plugins on my plan). The subscribe button is to follow my blog posts, and maybe you are a blog follower, but it looks dumb and unprofessional (so is this post that I’m writing, and I’ll probably delete it later). A couple hours into an exhaustive search about how to get it to go away, with search results saying “you can’t do it, it’s built in to WordPress” to “buy my plugin” — I find an answer. Again, thanks Reddit! (theres a button in Settings: General where you can click it off). But why was it automatically on in the first place? Money. You only get 100 subscribers before you have to pay WordPress.
Next blog should be about being a micro-business and being charged as much as big business for absolutely every aspect of running a business.
P.S. I’ve been a designer for a long time. I occasionally take freelance design work. See my portfolio here: https://melissaosgood.myportfolio.com
Leave a comment