The famous 5 minutes trap of WordPress
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Hey, you, the newest WordPress user! Did you also fall in the 5 minutes trap and now desperately seeking help?
The famous 5 minutes install has almost become the trademark of WordPress. Actually, despite the many failed installations, it is true! If you are not doing anything stupid, WP can be installed in five minutes or less. The longest “action” is waiting until the files upload using a FTP client.
And with this - all the five minutes things are over. Forever. And the user should be warned about it. And this is missing from the sales “pitch”.
Unfortunately, this very easy installation process creates very bad, false expectations. That’s what I call the “5 minutes trap”. It is a trap because the unsuspecting new user thinks that everything should (or would) be such an easy five minutes job. Most often s/he wants the theme customization to be an “easy, simple” one-click thing. Something that can be done in “five minutes”. After learning that modifying a theme usually requires a lot of learning (XHTML and CSS basics, at least) — there goes the big disappointment. Nobody wants to hear that the best theme designers out there have spent years learning their profession.
The reality about a WordPress blog is this: it is easy to install and it is equally easy to get a free downloadable theme to change the default “blue” look if it. However, if you don’t know anything about HTML and/or CSS - stop even thinking about doing anything else besides blogging. Go and write and post your articles and be thankful for the script and for the theme that you got for free.
Do not expect that you can learn to customize a theme in 5 minutes. Not even in 5 hours. I don’t want to discourage you from learning how to manage and customize your website. Just don’t expect any five-minutes-solutions. Being the webmaster (and occasional designer) of your own website… has nothing in common with instant gratification.
If you don’t believe me, just ask around how long did it take for your favourite web/theme designer to get to the level of knowledge where they are now.
LOL. My “five minutes” worked out to be approximately a dozen days, working until wee hours of the morning. Visiting the WordPress help forums to the point where even kind-tempered mods were getting fed up with my “silly” questions, and numerous headaches working out odd quirks with Internet Explorer. And I thought I knew css.
That said, a WordPress blog can be made to look like your page. It takes a lot more effort than five minutes though.
Oh yeah, a WP “blog” can look in many ways…
http://www.transycan.net/portfolio/
Compared to my last Movable Type install, the WP 5 minute install instructions and implementation was just that. It was simple, streamlined, and it WORKED! Even on my GoDaddy hosting account.
Yes, you’re totally right about the customization and most people do not realize that integrating the blog stuff into the whole of a website takes much more work. I’m attempting to learn all that (albeit very slowly) now. It’ll take more than just one site and one implementation, and that’s okay with me.
All that said, a WP install is very easy compared to what I’ve dealt with in the past with MT.
One lololol
At the five minute install.
I now pay to upgrade…haahahahaha!
On ‘Classic’ at the minute see if I can mess that up as well..:D
I tend to disagree with you on some points. I am running a wordpress based web-site and I think it is a successful one - well, at least I am very pleased with it. 90% of the content I have are static pages and it works just fine. So it’s not just plain blogging.
Customizing indeed requires good knowledge of CSS, HTML and PHP, but is there any alternative out there? Can you make a serious design without knowing CSS and HTML? No, you can’t.
Yet WP has plenty of free themes. You can pick one and begin modifying it. Over time you will have something of your own.
And it has all those plug-ins that are really handy.
Sometimes bugs make it really annoying, but all software has bugs and the only thing you can do is to choose which one has less problems at some given point of time.
On the other hand I totally dislike how WP talks about typepad trap. I bet it is completely the same with WP - once you in, you cannot get out without loosing all your content. And even if its not true, changing your habits is always difficult, so any software that requires you to get used to itself is a trap.
Hi Alexander,
I don’t think there is much that we have disagree on. The above post was born out of my frustration in the WP Support Forums (where I am a mod with 4 years “seniority” and over 20,000 posts…) - and where all the newbies want instant gratification. Without at least the basic knowledge of FTP, HTML or just what a simple plain text editor is, not to mention CSS and/or reading skills to study the Codex, they all want to “customize” themes, to add sidebars and stuff like that.
They are the ones that expect everything to be a 5-minutes, one-click thing.
I do know how to make themes, my free Dark Maple theme is used on many thousands of blogs.
Thanks for stopping by.