For months now, I’ve been using WordPress to run this little blog, and it’s given me a chance to really examine WP for its much-vaunted powers and prowess, and to see what it’s like from an innovation point of view, I guess.
And I have to say, my overall feeling is one of being quite underwhelmed.
Before I go any further, I probably should provide a little background.
About 3 years ago I was looking at attaching a blog to a site I was running, and naturally chose WordPress for the job; it was the ‘go to’ tool for blogging, and it was written in PHP, the same language the rest of the site was.
My experience then wasn’t that exciting, but I managed to get the site menu and theme integrated, and eventually pull information out of WP for the site’s front page, as well as bodging together two plugins with common data. Again nothing interesting or exciting, but certainly an experience I’m glad I had.
And so it was that time passed and I forgot about the nuances of my WP experience – until getting round to September last year when I decided to start this site. I wasn’t sure what kind of site I wanted to do, whether it was a forum or a blog, but I was reasonably sure I didn’t have the time to start fully community building, and just wanted a place to stand, so I settled on a blog, and naturally the first thought was WP. I’m not even sure I know any other blog platforms, that’s how ubiquitous WP has become.
And so, here I am, 40 or so posts in, and I find myself distinctly underwhelmed by it all. I don’t really see that too much has changed between 2.7 or whatever it was then and 3.1, though I do see a few changes, including the default theme.
It’s interesting, I saw some of the blog entries about the design work that went into the admin panel changes, of the mockups and wireframes and so on, and I realised that it didn’t matter. Even as much as I was technically interested in what was going on, I knew ultimately that I probably wouldn’t be staying with WP unless it gave me reason to. It had to impress me, and given its reputation it should have done.
Trouble is, the biggest single thing that I personally do on the blog is write content, and I find it almost a chore to write. Not the actual writing part, mind, not the act of setting words in motion, because it’s a subject I’m passionate about. But the act of doing it with WordPress… it’s not poetry in motion, it’s poetry at a stop signal.
I find the whole atmosphere of WordPress so uninspiring, so unimaginative. Now, I know people can point at the fact I’m using the default theme and cry that it’s a blank canvas to draw on, but even a blank canvas is more interesting.
I’m not talking quite so much about the browsing bits but the content production area, and the admin area. It’s so dull, lifeless. The most interesting thing you can do is give it blue tones instead of white/grey. It’s also that the writing bit seems detached from the reading bit, as though I’m chugging away at something totally different that is a separate site. It just doesn’t feel right.
I have no plans of stopping writing about innovation, of course, just that in the not too distant future, I need to change platforms. To something more interesting, more inspiring and one that doesn’t make me feel sleepy after staring it for more than 10 minutes.
I have a new platform in mind, though it needs some work before I can use it. Since it’s also a good case study for innovation I’ll see about discussing it then too. But for now… gotta hit the button before I fall asleep…
Blogger, from Google, isn’t a lot better.
Sure you can use HTML in it but I think WP can too.
I’ve done some semi-funky stuff with images – like x% width instead of a fixed number, but that’s about it.
It does what it does, and no more. Somehow ‘easy to do’ became synonymous with ‘no really interesting features’. I draw the line at faulting the medium, though I suppose it might be a bit different if I was writing about webpages (or perhaps innovation
).
However, since you are, I’ll cross that line here.
I do agree that it’s less ‘blank canvas’ and more ‘dense, poor quality soil’. You’re not so much inspired by the interface as you are tilling it up and getting things to grow in spite of it. You may as well be writing in WordPad as WordPress.
Even the some of the highest ranked (non-commercial)blogs don’t do anything special to the underlying software. It’s all about the content – and it’s a poor workman that blames his tools :p
Maybe the insta-permission wasn’t such a good idea after all.
And still true. :/ Only the first paragraph should be ‘quote’
You can use pretty much any arbitrary HTML in WordPress, though I’ve been bitten before by its sanitisation process; I sometimes wonder if there aren’t still yet more security issues in it, so many of them have been in the past.
It’s not the fact that there aren’t interesting features in the WP admin panel, because there are. It’s the fact that it’s proactively so dull in how it goes about it, and more importantly, there is an active disconnect between what goes on here and what goes on in the posting area.
Right now I’m replying here, I can see the previous replies, and I’m seeing the main theme of the site; I know I haven’t changed it, but if I had changed it to something unique (as I plan to do), I retain the immersion of the theme around what I’m doing.
Not so for new topics, though; you’re taken to the WP admin area which has nothing at all to do with the front page in terms of how it looks or feels. It might as well be a totally different site – the only visual cue that it’s related is the fact that the title of the site is at the top of the page.
Even on the default theme here, the differences are legion:
* The menu’s on the left in the admin area, not the right as it is here.
* Buttons here have a very slightly rounded corner and vague gradient (in Chrome at least), while buttons there have pronounced rounded corners, and major buttons are in blue rather than grey.
* Here, the focus is on the content consumption, with navigation to other content, there the focus is much more varied, since the typical layout doesn’t just present the big ol’ box to put content in, but also separate little panels for publication date, style, categories, tags, whether to allow discussion, custom information fields, hand-crafted excerpts – and navigation to the rest of the admin panel.
And all of that in either grey or blue tones, regardless of what the rest of the site does, all too easily it feels like you’re working on a different site, at best it’s the difference between being behind the stage pulling the puppet’s strings and being on the other side as part of the community as a whole.
Sure, I know that unlike conventional forums, a blog is mostly one-sided in terms of content generation and communication, and that naturally leads to new content having a higher priority in the scheme of things, but to essentially make it ‘part of the site administration’ takes it a further level away from where the content is consumed.
The blank canvas comment was more aimed at the theme, really. The site theme is a canvas to be manipulated and is fertile ground for doing beautiful things – and there are some truly beautiful themes for WordPress. I just didn’t, knowing full well that I’d be moving on – but as I sort of hinted, it’s not the site theme that gives me problems.
The backend isn’t, as far as I can determine, particularly themeable, which means it’s not a blank canvas, it’s a common consistent interface for content production, but one that as above is vastly different to the environment in which it will be consumed, and one that has no real life in it.
That’s really what I’m getting at – as I’ve talked about before (and will do so more in articles to come), inspiration is one of the essences of innovation, and there’s nothing particularly innovative in the WP admin area. I would do it the justice of calling it utilitarian, except that most of the things there, I doubt most people use except the pro bloggers, simply because it’s a lot of fluff, and it’s incredibly boring to actually use.
It feels more like filling in an online form rather than content creation at times, which really isn’t an ideal environment for inspiration. Sure, you can turn the blocks off, but they’re there by default – and this is supposed to be an interface that was designed, mocked-up, reviewed, discussed and then finally approved.
So are you one of the people that goes to Universal Studios and complains that all the buildings are just ‘fronts’?
The reason they are such – less work for the production company, and more room to put other things. That’s also why you’re usually on a tram when you’re touring.
Just like 99% of people watching a movie don’t see the set (at least not in person – during filming), most of the people reading a blog don’t see the backend. It’s uninspiring, but that’s hardly a justifiable reason to double (triple or more) the workload of the software programmers and theme designers.
Well, I fixed the HTML
OK, firstly, no I wouldn’t be one of the people that goes to Universal Studios to complain about the set, haha. Yeah, I understand the reason why they do it – for all the things you’ve outlined.
In the case of WordPress, sure, the majority of users won’t see the backend, but there’s no reason to leave it so damn dull.
It should be noted that other platforms that manage content do so without making much distinction between content consumption and content creation in terms of the site theme, without ‘doubling or tripling’ the workload. The reality is that it adds at most 10% to the workload if done properly in the first place.
The reason I’m most annoyed is that there’s a firm difference between user interface and user experience. You can create the most usable interface out there, but unless you can encourage people to use them, they won’t.
It’s like cars, imagine a Porsche, a beautifully bodied car, with a dashboard that’s like something out of a 1960s VW Beetle. It might be beautiful on the outside but it’s going to be less luxurious to drive – while it still has all the facilities, the experience is ruined.
I just find it slightly awkward typing my thoughts into a little grey box on a white screen, as though they couldn’t afford proper colour or something.
See, colour is one of those subconscious cues; dull colours naturally tend towards balanced, neutral, even dull thoughts. Compare that to sites that have lots of blue in them, they tend to feel a little cold and detached, while dark colours with light accents tend to indicate controversy, reds for passion – and people are influenced by it in the way they produce content, the way they reply to it and so on.
It’s all part of the user experience and mine of the WP posting area is that it discourages posting by default, and even the other colour options don’t really do much to inspire the act of putting word to textbox.
Depends what you want to change. I’m basing my estimate on the number of buttons and screens that are in the ‘making’ vs the ‘reading’ part of the blog. If you had a custom graphic, position, size, font etc. for everything – a lot of work would be added to making the theme, programming the flexibility and doing the testing. If you’re just going to grab a bg colour and a few fonts, then yes, 10%.
It depends what you equate writing blogs to – driving, or checking under the hood. It’d seems to be more of the latter (although they do use ‘dashboard’ as one of the buttons).
Still, as I said earlier, if it bothers you that much, write it in a separate text editor, or hijack the code with Greasemonkey.
That’s the thing: the actual ‘making’ part is basically one screen. There’s no requirement to tie it into the rest of the administration, and even then there’s no reason why the common header and navigation couldn’t have been used to manage the administration too.
Actually, it doesn’t. In the majority of cases you build the content in a modular fashion (header/navigation/footer with main content being drop-in)
I’m not saying that everything has to be plugged into a common theme (even though that would be ideal for keeping a totally consistent user experience, and it’s just as easy to do on a properly constructed environment), but that there should be some consistency between the two.
Right now, there is actually double the work going on because you have nothing being shared between the front and back end.
Writing the content should be like driving a car – it should be streamlined and match the experience and expectation of the car itself; you wouldn’t spend a lot of money on a stylish sports car if it drove like a pig on stilts.
Administration and configuration is like checking under the hood, though, and I don’t object to a separate interface for that. I just object to the posting interface being detached from the reading interface, both logically and stylistically.
I can’t comment on WP – as I use Blogger – though it does sound similar (annotated screenshots perhaps?). As shown in the link above, the ‘Write Blog’ bit has more in common, and is more clearly attached, to the rest of the ‘under the hood stuff’. Which it almost is – as you can tie it to a release schedule and such from there as well.
I don’t see that as an impediment to the creative process. It’s an Ugly step (with a capital U) but one that seems fairly entrenched with the *current* products. As I do a lot of stuff external to that – taking the pictures, uploading them, forming thoughts etc. it doesn’t impact me that much.
It’s probably better equated to ‘filling the tank’ than ‘driving’ which can’t really be all that fun, no matter how you spin it.
Yeah, it is fairly similar, except WP’s is just more neutral and has more stuff in it.
Thing is, there’s “under the hood” for stuff that’s directly related to writing, such as the scheduling for the future, the category it’s under, that kind of thing, and there’s all the other “under the hood” stuff, like configuration, plugins and so on.
IOW, as far as WP is concerned, management and creation are facets of the same task. But where I’m coming from – more like a forum environment – creation is a separation task to management. In forums, you can generally manage the day to day stuff from the same place you view it, it’s cohesive and all has the style embedded in it. Not so with WP.
In fact, replying to comments is about the only place I can directly inherit the layout and still have some ability to do anything – it’s the only place where I still keep the experience I could carefully craft with a theme or whatever.
As for filling the tank, yeah, that’s closer to the reality a little. There is something nicer about pulling up to the forecourt in a big swish car and filling the tank than there is scooting up in a VW Beetle though…