Wordpress is a fascinating example of worse-is-better in market-facing technology. I was working with Wordpress early on and finally fired my last client 2 year

Wordpress is a fascinating example of worse-is-better in market-facing technology. I was working with Wordpress early on and finally fired my last client 2 years ago. What many inexperienced clients expect from technology is a miracle, a magic pill, and if they get an experience that is "easier" and "intuitive", they will ignore all other issues. It got uneasy quick enough for them. I always found it hilarious, when I still had a consulting gig, when clients would cancel their yearly service and upkeep subscription because "we can do everything with plug-ins, and my kid/ friend/ junior assistant can do Wordpress" only to come back with a last-minute "save us" fix request because their install was hacked due to disabled automatic updates, crappy plug-ins (the new "wordpress expert" could not review plug-in quality). And whatever they do, they always start changing the theme and colors when they take over. Because everyone is an expert on what they can see. Oh boy, does choice of font and headings formatting matter! Why waste budget on back-ups, static world-facing pages, hardening the admin, let alone implementing testing and statistics to identify customer needs and interest, etc. People are fascinating - today, most of them have lost data when a phone or computer crashed. They know about back-ups from past painful experience. But if you look at statistics for themes vs back-up implementations and downloads, It's the presentation that matters most. They can't tell you why. It hurts them to articulate why! If you look at logs for any world-facing website, you will see multiple scans for Wordpress vulnerabilities. If you review WP security history, it includes astounding penetration of core architecture. They decide Emojis are a core system feature? Not preventing user enumeration or XSS? Emojis get hacked. Tweaking theme colors is ever so important? Core Wordpress color tweaking gets hacked. JSON REST API is important turned on out of the box for some reasion? That gets hacked. Long history of bad decisions that should have not been enabled by default. Wordpress right is not easy. But it gives the inexperienced customers more of what they think they want, out of the box, than any other CMS system. There's a lesson there. For me as a consultant, it was: either outsource a large part of my business to someone very cheap and work as a reseller if I want to stay in Wordpress, or raise my customer quality. It is unfair to blame the customer, we are not any closer to core scientific principles in computer education than when we started. Information science should be core of the school curriculum, and we should have the same open scientific standards in our digital literacy courses that we have in physics or biology. It would be great if people could understand the difference between information and presentation, for starters. It was impossible to point out to my customers that Craigslist was successful without any styling because they were delivering value to their customers. Most thought a good website "looked good, you know, like Apple".