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> Sites that have been painstakingly, designed and built, reviewed and refined to the last detail And this misses the point. Many/most businesses gain zero bu

by bsder 5y ago

> Sites that have been painstakingly, designed and built, reviewed and refined to the last detail And this misses the point. Many/most businesses gain zero business value from a website. Most businesses don't need a bespoke website. They need a website that looks like every other business website, allows marketing to throw a new whitepaper up every couple of months, and maybe allows people to send marketing/sales an email from a form. That's it. Nothing more. Most businesses don't need a $100,000 website. They don't need an optimized UX experience. They simply need a "good enough" web experience because not having a web experience is considered a faux pas even if your web experience is a gigantic waste of your time and brings no value to the business. A Wordpress hosting company is perfect for this.

scarecrowbob 5y ago
I do a lot of WordPress hosting. I more or less agree with you: I really don't think most orgs are served by having custom theming. I've done several websites at the low 6 figure range. I've seen a lot of work go into fine details. To me that's fair: good design is just a lot of tiny tweaks iterating toward something simple, and that's what the designer I work with does well. If that makes the people we're working for feel good, then yay. If it helps, most of that cost actually goes into data modeling, migrating/ cleaning the data, training users on the admin system, or connecting the site to an ERP and writing functionality to render that data. Or requirements gathering, process documentation, publication strategies, or whatever. Another side is that most of the off-the-shelf stuff I see won't pass our a11y audit. Which is important to me not just from an ass-covering direction but because I really think that blind folks ought to be able to use the web. As to the author's point, just locking down what users can do should be good enough. I've been crapping out WP sites in an hour for my musician friends, and my hope is that full site editing gets good enough that I don't need a theme, just a good plugin. But yeah, in general you're right. I tell folks that they should concentrate on finding some good content, and then the rest of the crap doesn't matter.
danjac 5y ago
I suspect Wordpress developers make bank from the Everest-sized amount of bikeshedding from non-developers that goes the average bog-standard corporate website.
- ratww 5y ago
  Yeah. Most WP developers and Wordpress itself agree with GP, but it is businesses asking for six-figures websites that require a designer to get made, despite developers and Wordpress saying the contrary. I've seen it happening a thousand times: businesses asking for extremely intricate websites (despite better advice), only to fail to deliver the content they needed room for and having to hire copywriters for fluff. At some point they don't care about money anymore, it's all about the thrill of the bike shed.

by bsder 5y ago

scarecrowbob 5y ago

I do a lot of WordPress hosting. I more or less agree with you: I really don't think most orgs are served by having custom theming. I've done several websites at the low 6 figure range. I've seen a lot of work go into fine details. To me that's fair: good design is just a lot of tiny tweaks iterating toward something simple, and that's what the designer I work with does well. If that makes the people we're working for feel good, then yay. If it helps, most of that cost actually goes into data modeling, migrating/ cleaning the data, training users on the admin system, or connecting the site to an ERP and writing functionality to render that data. Or requirements gathering, process documentation, publication strategies, or whatever. Another side is that most of the off-the-shelf stuff I see won't pass our a11y audit. Which is important to me not just from an ass-covering direction but because I really think that blind folks ought to be able to use the web. As to the author's point, just locking down what users can do should be good enough. I've been crapping out WP sites in an hour for my musician friends, and my hope is that full site editing gets good enough that I don't need a theme, just a good plugin. But yeah, in general you're right. I tell folks that they should concentrate on finding some good content, and then the rest of the crap doesn't matter.

danjac 5y ago

I suspect Wordpress developers make bank from the Everest-sized amount of bikeshedding from non-developers that goes the average bog-standard corporate website.

ratww 5y ago
Yeah. Most WP developers and Wordpress itself agree with GP, but it is businesses asking for six-figures websites that require a designer to get made, despite developers and Wordpress saying the contrary. I've seen it happening a thousand times: businesses asking for extremely intricate websites (despite better advice), only to fail to deliver the content they needed room for and having to hire copywriters for fluff. At some point they don't care about money anymore, it's all about the thrill of the bike shed.