A dad's advice to himself and his kids.

Important revelation: WordPress sucks.  It’s horrible.  It takes forever to use, it’s not user friendly, it’s not intuitive, it breaks, and it is too complex.  WP has systemic problems.  The UX people that make it must hate their users, putting a big dumb dashboard…with 71 options in their faces every time they log into the “back end.”    It’s cobbled with options that don’t matter, menus that are rarely used, and to do anything substantial to it, you need to mess with .htaccess or the back end.

These are all fair and valid complaints from the perspective of a person brought kicking and screaming into the Internet age, because something as simple as uploading a page takes several steps: go to WP, go to /wp-admin, hit “add page.”  Type content, if you’re embedding a video you need either a special plugin or you need to hit “edit HTML” (which is intimidating).   You might need to upload (not drag and drop) a picture.

Windows Live Writer took care of some of these issues, but it still butchers the markup to the point of errors in spacing and markup.   There is no “just works” tool out there.  Mars Edit–the best WP software on the planet–is a breath of fresh air, but even it isn’t perfect or game changing.  It wins because it helps you focus on writing.

But look: there are brilliant business people that will never use WordPress because working on a WP site feels like work.  It’s unfamiliar.  It doesn’t feel like Word, Outlook or even a Mac.  It is clumsier than an Ipod, and it takes too much effort to interact with the WP ecosystem, since it’s unlike anything else and not particularly good.

The best tools for WP aren’t revolutionary because the UX is only adequate. Thesis is marvelous for me.  It’s a beautiful framework that allows a few lines of code to boss around an entire website.  A few lines of CSS and you’ve got whatever you want.  But…you still have to code.  That means that thesis is hard.  I shared some basic HTML with a smart business associate, and I learned that she was intimidated just because it was HTML.

This means that WP has only scratched the surface of its marketshare.

This is a truly fixable problem.  A tool that works like LiveWriter but didn’t inherit Redmond’s stupidness can change the world.  If it can use XMLRPC and boss WP around without running afoul of the vaunted GPL, then we have something that changes the world.  We have to make things “apple simple” and when we do, we win.