This is a personal request from your users, a rallying cry from a compatriot. I personally love WordPress. I make my living from it. The average user, though, couldn’t care less about it. They just want to run their business, tell their family history, organize their church, share their photos or live their life online with a minimum of impedance. In its evolution from simple blogging tool to CMS, framework and software ecosystem, WordPress is losing its way. It needs us to help bring it back and cultivate simple genius.
My agency married WordPress in 2007. We’d been dating for a number of years but were still seeing others: some serious flirtation with Joomla, a blind date with Drupal, a summer romance with CMSMS, even a steady five-year stint with a custom CMS that we lovingly named Rocinante (after Don Quixote’s loyal steed). We tied the knot with WordPress for one single reason: about six to nine months after most of our projects, we would get the fateful call. “The only person who really understands how to use the website you built just left the company, and we need someone to train us!” It was almost inevitable, except on WordPress. No one ever called for help after a WordPress project except to share their excitement and book the next project. They just figured it out. It was easy and obvious and beautiful. Our clients loved it, and that was something you could grow a business on.
Then, WordPress started to grow up. New features like the menu manager, theme editor and sidebar widgets made WordPress more robust but more complicated. The ecosystem of plugins exploded. WordPress plugins are harder to use than they should be. Ask your users. We did. It was quite illuminating and a hint embarrassing. We decided to act on Tom Ewe’s call to arms and lead by example.