Got some beef with wordpress!

Get Started
1

Hey guys,

I’m fairly new to web design and development.

I know little about wordpress, and I think it’s great for those non-techies that dont have the time to learn HTML/CSS etc.

But I feel like I notice very similar site designs and pages all over the web now with these “themes”.

I know a person that is starting a webdesign/marketing business and his site is a word press theme that looks so generic, yet it looks professional?! I think it’s funny a web design company would use a wordpress theme for their site, and one that I’ve seen used before.

I guess I get a bit discouraged when I see all these sites go up yet they took someone 10 min to develop, and we got people like me, making great looking custom designed and coded to best practice( or at least I try to!:)) sites, and we spend hours and hours on them.

Am I alone? :confused:

2

They may pay for their decision down the line when they have upgrade problems etc.

Really, though, I don’t mind there being cheap options available, as it helps separate the real clients from the fake ones. That is, it’s easier to identify a client who wants a proper business website that is customized to their real need.

3

Don’t be discouraged for every wp evangelist there are several more who understand that wp isn’t the answer to everything. Its a nice blogging system but beyond that there are better tools. I can’t even talk about the server side code without wanting to take a cold shower.

4

Problem is, it’s hard for businesses to tell who is a legit web design/development company.

Some guy charged an arm and a leg a year or two back for a website of a relative, and I checked it out and it was a bunch of generated dreamweaver crap, and other really bad practices were used.

5

I wouldn’t be discouraged. Designing for the web isn’t really all that easy, and it shows when people toss together sites. Dark text on a dark gradient is going to look bad, yet I constantly see things like that when folks don’t know what they are doing. It doean’t matter how they get there-- had coded or some’s template.

Also, keep in mind even for a lot of web folks a company website is something that is not making them any money by itself… if you get your business through direct referral or cold-calling, then any time spent on your site is time that you are not getting paid.

Also, I wouldn’t let the desire to work hard lead you to overlook the fact there is some real power behind existing templates and CMS systems.

First of all, there is no need to reinvent the wheel when doing a website. There are a certain set of things that people want in a site, and the various CMS systems do their jobs of getting those functionalities in place without expending a lot of time and effort on something that other people have already struggled through.

Second of all, even though a lot of stuff looks kind of generic, people coming to websites have a bunch of generic expectations. They want the navigation to be obvious. They want to know where they are and what is going on as soon as the page loads. And these generic templates get that done very quickly.

Finally, if you are going to spend hours and hours working on a site, why not spend that time working on the actual stuff that needs to change? I do a lot of work where I start with a framework that ends up looking completely different than it starts out.

It is a pain if you do it wrong and have to end up making compromised decisions hacking through poorly coded templates. IMO, it is a bad idea to compromise your design because it is easier to code it in a site.

But at the same time, if I need a two column layout with a header and a footer generated by joomla, then I am going to start with someone else’s template. It is the graphical touches that I make to the layout, the photo direction, and -most importantly- the content that really matter.

6

I suggest you to use FIREBUG+FIREFOX to explore a site to learn CSS and html.