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> based on bitter experience trying to convince marketing people to stop using WP and just use a static site. Sounds pretty user-hostile. You're talking about

by zild3d 2y ago

> based on bitter experience trying to convince marketing people to stop using WP and just use a static site. Sounds pretty user-hostile. You're talking about marketers who have a "Job to be done" which is to make content and get it in front of some target audience. Of course the editing experience trumps security and rendering speed. I'm confused why you're confused they always choose WP over figuring out text editors and git! The experiment should be giving them a nice editing experience that behind the scenes is creating a static site and some git to deploy vs wordpress. Then maybe the secondary requirements you care mostly about will be relevant

Aeolun 2y ago
> You're talking about marketers who have a "Job to be done" which is to make content and get it in front of some target audience That’s not their job. Their job is to sell stuff (or make it more likely to be bought anyway). How they sell stuff is something they can determine themselves. You’d think that at some level the ‘faster websites sell more’ speech gets through to them, but the important distinction there is that many do not care about what their job is (just like many recent engineers), they just care that it’s easy to do and they don’t get fired. So… Wordpress.
- immibis 2y ago
  We are suffering from some kind of crisis of measurable competency across the board. The appearance of contributing to achieving something is more important than actually achieving it. It may be related to the preceding extremely long ZIRP period.
- macspoofing 2y ago
  >That’s not their job. Their job is to sell stuff (or make it more likely to be bought anyway). Huh? What are you talking about? Marketing is the job of Marketers, which in most companies (certainly small to mid companies) includes the content on the marketing web-page. >You’d think that at some level the ‘faster websites sell more’ speech gets through to them The technical aspect of how a web-site works, or how it is deployed or how quickly it is rendered, is NOT their job. Optimizing render speed of a given web-page is not part of their skillset - nor should it be. There are folks who specialize in that, typically software engineers. It is also not reasonable to expect marketing folks to create html/css/javascript and deploy via git. You really do want those folks to be independent and create the necessary content without needing an engineer anytime they want to add a new sub-section or fix a spelling mistake. One "problem" is that most small/mid size businesses are not willing to hire technical folks or use engineering resources to do the technical part of this work. Another problem is that there should not be a tension between ease-of-use by editor and page rendering speed. Maybe WP is a bad product, and if so, what is the alternative that covers both use cases?
  - fragmede 2y ago
    use WP to generate the site and then serve it statically as much as you can
    - macspoofing 2y ago
      Sure - and in principle 'someone' should go and setup this pipeline. I can guarantee you that if this process is reasonably transparent to the marketing folks, they will not care. Or do you expect the marketing folks to go and setup this static page caching?
      - lsaferite 2y ago
        WP has plugins to publish as a static site already. They just don't seem to be very commonly used. You get the 'ease' of the WP admin UI and the 'safety/speed' of a static site.
- possibleworlds 2y ago
  Just install any old file based caching plugin like KeyCdn Cache Enabler or Gator Cache and a Wordpress install becomes a static site for every single request until content is updated. Takes all of 5 minutes, win win for all involved.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    A bit off topic since the thread here was related to performance, but caching in WP doesn't solve the other big problem of security. A caching layer can indeed make WP act much like a static site, though the cache still lives on your server rather than a global CDN layer. Behind that cache, though, you still have the live WP server with all the potential security risks that come with it. Caching is a nice perf gain, but if you want a static site anyway there are still major gains to be made with a proper static site distributed globally.
    - hnfong 2y ago
      Aside from some once-in-a-blue-moon security breach events, how does better security help a salesperson sell more stuff?
      - _heimdall 2y ago
        If gross sales is literally the only important metric in software engineering we've already failed. Though on the cost side security breaches can be expensive, as can the endless task of updates and maintenance required for a live server. Live servers can also be a scaling bottleneck, often that isn't too important but it would be for anything that is highly seasonal or has large spikes of use during Black Friday events or similar.
        closewith 2y ago
        > If gross sales is literally the only important metric in software engineering we've already failed. It literally is the only important metric is commercial software development. Not sure how you could delude yourself into thinking otherwise.
- honestAbe22 2y ago
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by zild3d 2y ago

Aeolun 2y ago

> You're talking about marketers who have a "Job to be done" which is to make content and get it in front of some target audience That’s not their job. Their job is to sell stuff (or make it more likely to be bought anyway). How they sell stuff is something they can determine themselves. You’d think that at some level the ‘faster websites sell more’ speech gets through to them, but the important distinction there is that many do not care about what their job is (just like many recent engineers), they just care that it’s easy to do and they don’t get fired. So… Wordpress.

immibis 2y ago
We are suffering from some kind of crisis of measurable competency across the board. The appearance of contributing to achieving something is more important than actually achieving it. It may be related to the preceding extremely long ZIRP period.
macspoofing 2y ago
>That’s not their job. Their job is to sell stuff (or make it more likely to be bought anyway). Huh? What are you talking about? Marketing is the job of Marketers, which in most companies (certainly small to mid companies) includes the content on the marketing web-page. >You’d think that at some level the ‘faster websites sell more’ speech gets through to them The technical aspect of how a web-site works, or how it is deployed or how quickly it is rendered, is NOT their job. Optimizing render speed of a given web-page is not part of their skillset - nor should it be. There are folks who specialize in that, typically software engineers. It is also not reasonable to expect marketing folks to create html/css/javascript and deploy via git. You really do want those folks to be independent and create the necessary content without needing an engineer anytime they want to add a new sub-section or fix a spelling mistake. One "problem" is that most small/mid size businesses are not willing to hire technical folks or use engineering resources to do the technical part of this work. Another problem is that there should not be a tension between ease-of-use by editor and page rendering speed. Maybe WP is a bad product, and if so, what is the alternative that covers both use cases?
- fragmede 2y ago
  use WP to generate the site and then serve it statically as much as you can
  - macspoofing 2y ago
    Sure - and in principle 'someone' should go and setup this pipeline. I can guarantee you that if this process is reasonably transparent to the marketing folks, they will not care. Or do you expect the marketing folks to go and setup this static page caching?
    - lsaferite 2y ago
      WP has plugins to publish as a static site already. They just don't seem to be very commonly used. You get the 'ease' of the WP admin UI and the 'safety/speed' of a static site.
possibleworlds 2y ago
Just install any old file based caching plugin like KeyCdn Cache Enabler or Gator Cache and a Wordpress install becomes a static site for every single request until content is updated. Takes all of 5 minutes, win win for all involved.
- _heimdall 2y ago
  A bit off topic since the thread here was related to performance, but caching in WP doesn't solve the other big problem of security. A caching layer can indeed make WP act much like a static site, though the cache still lives on your server rather than a global CDN layer. Behind that cache, though, you still have the live WP server with all the potential security risks that come with it. Caching is a nice perf gain, but if you want a static site anyway there are still major gains to be made with a proper static site distributed globally.
  - hnfong 2y ago
    Aside from some once-in-a-blue-moon security breach events, how does better security help a salesperson sell more stuff?
    - _heimdall 2y ago
      If gross sales is literally the only important metric in software engineering we've already failed. Though on the cost side security breaches can be expensive, as can the endless task of updates and maintenance required for a live server. Live servers can also be a scaling bottleneck, often that isn't too important but it would be for anything that is highly seasonal or has large spikes of use during Black Friday events or similar.
      - closewith 2y ago
        > If gross sales is literally the only important metric in software engineering we've already failed. It literally is the only important metric is commercial software development. Not sure how you could delude yourself into thinking otherwise.
honestAbe22 2y ago
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