On WordPress
Before I start this, here’s a little disclaimer. I love wordpress and all of the options that it has, but I don’t think that it is a one size fits all solution. When an Internet ignorant person comes to me for a suggestion on how to set up their website, they expect to get some knowledge and wisdom out of me, not the same stuff I give to everybody else. I feel like people are often given wordpress, because that’s what everybody else uses, not because that is what they need. WordPress is great, it has a lot of plugins available, and it is customizable to no end. It also has a lot of things that a small website might not need, such as the ability to blog.
I recently found a CMS called Concrete5 it is a free open source CMS. While templating isn’t as intuitive as wordpress, what the end user sees is simply stunning. It has a feature that I have wanted to see in WordPress for a while now, inline editing. This alone wouldn’t make me change my mind, but everything on the concrete5 dashboard seems much more intuitive to me.
I know that lot of people have invested a lot of time and money into developing for wordpress, and there is a lot of money available in supporting wordpress. But I also know that designers should be more worried about the end user, than making a quick buck. If you could make your customer happier without using wordpress, why wouldn’t you?