Wordpress Themes: WYPIWYG
(What You Pay Is What You Get)
README:
This isn’t a Wordpress hate post.
This is a post about customer exploitation (or not?).
These are my opinions from my experience, doesn’t mean they are correct.
Companies or individuals with great products shouldn’t be offended, they should be proud.
Wordpress: The king of content management
For the past years the number of websites built with Wordpress has gone through the roof. Why? First of all, its free. But there are many free solutions out there. So, how did Wordpress won the race?
Well, in humble my opinion, the real reasons are:
- People started using Wordpress as a blog platform and that’s what they got used to work with.
- Wordpress had more significant updates than other content management platforms over the years.
- The latter resulted to having more friendly UI and that created a cycle of new users, more friendly UI and more plugins.
- Designers felt more comfortable working with it and customers felt more comfortable paying only one person.
Wordpress themes: Some of them are evil
Unfortunately a high percentage of paid Wordpress themes out there, are garbage. These themes are targeted to mass consumption which results to low quality, almost identical products.
My personal experience with a paid theme was this:
When I sent a ticket to a creators’ community for a backend bug with the solution, I got the following answer:
You can adapt your code as you wish
WTF?!? I didn’t even ask for support, I sent it for everyone to see it and just requested that it would be added to a future update. I don’t want to patch it myself every time!
But I had already paid for the product, they didn’t care.
If you pay “X” amount of money you are going to get a product/service worth of “X”.
But why are these themes so cheap?
- Low quality code
- No optimization
- No originality
- No actual after sales support
- More than one client
- Difficult to use control panels
- Process: Design, Code, Build, Ship
Custom theme build process
And why is a “custom” solution not so cheap? Because someone is working only for one client and not for one product that will be bought by many clients.
Developing a custom theme is a whole different process, a whole different relationship between you, the client, and the product. Each individual will work for a solution for one client’s needs only.
Don’t forget, originality is paid too!
Here are some (oversimplified) responsibilities for a website build process:
Web Designer
- Requirements analysis
- Site map
- Wireframe and design elements planning
- Mock-ups based on requirements analysis
- Review and approval cycle
Web Developer
- Requirements analysis
- Build development framework (We can skip this if Wordpress is being used as a platform)
- Code templates for each page type
- Develop and test special features and interactivity
- Debugging
And this is from an article of Smashing Magazine’s website from 2011.
I won’t start talking about responsive web design, typography, code and page load time optimization.
Do all paid Wordpress themes suck?
No! Of course not, there are some great companies with great products out there but people tend to search for the easiest and cheapest solution.
Is there a way out?
Because not all Wordpress universe is evil, there are some things we can do to make the web a better place:
- Use only high quality themes. If we boycott the garbage the best companies will prevail. More importantly you will have built a beautiful project that may cost more, but eventually will get you more clients. Don’t forget, a good portfolio equals to a strong cv.
- Create our own themes. If you do not have the knowledge, you can always learn.
- Educate the client. Inform them for the dangers of their choices. We can always drop a client. If they don’t respect their product there’s a chance they won’t respect you either, or even pay you.
Bonus non relative wisdom
Do I believe that Wordpress is the solution to everything?
No! Until Wordpress changes its concept to a more general purpose than a blog platform, I do not. I believe it is a one way road for them. For now there are more elegant solutions for building a website or an app.
