(no subject)

[deemoyza]

Is it just me, or is Wordpress incredibly unintuitive? It mimics the ease of drag-and-drop, but once you get your elements in place, aligning/editing/refining them requires clicking on options that I really wouldn't think of to do the particular task I'm looking for.

Now, I'm nowhere near fluent in HTML/CSS, but there are great resources online, and once you get the gist of what you want, tweaking it to your liking is easy. (And, no, I'm not paying for the "privilege" of tinkering with WP's CSS.)

WP, however...*sigh*. I'll figure it out soon enough, and probably laugh at myself later, but for now, *sigh*.

ETA: I HAVE FOUND A CODE EDITOR. This may make my project a whole lot less irritating. We'll see.

ETA 2 (9/9, 120 AM): It didn't. :(

ETA 3 (9/10): TEMPLATES. It's all about the freaking templates. Yes, I may be dense. This has been a learning experience, for sure, and not a pleasant one.

pssh, templates... >:[

Comments

[rynling]

It's not just you!

Up until about two years ago, Wordpress used to be fairly basic and easy to use. Unfortunately, in the interest of accessibility to people who have phones instead of computers, it's now extremely difficult to use unless one of the preset templates is exactly what you need. To give an example: Not only is the way to insert an image into a post (or page) counterintuitive to begin with, but it requires three extra steps, plus another two extra steps to correct the garbage auto-formatting. This is infuriating to me, especially because everything used to be so simple and easy. Even worse, you have to pay an absurd monthly fee to have access to the same sort of simple text-entry box used by Dreamwidth, which is ridiculous.

But at least it's not Squarespace, where you can't deviate from the preset templates at all no matter how much money you give them.

Sorry for venting! I just wanted to assure you that your frustrations are well-founded.

[deemoyza]

I'm so relieved to hear it's not just me! I swear, I thought I was losing my mind, that something that theoretically should be so simple was not working the way I wanted it to.

In my case, I chose the "Blank Canvas" theme specifically because I wanted the freedom to design my site the way I wanted to, and still there were mystery menus showing up on my page, and sections disappearing into the digital ether. I later discovered that instead of formatting one CSS style sheet and being done with it, I had to format a sheet for each element (page, header/footer, etc.) individually. Ugh.

Don't apologize for venting; I do plenty of it myself! :) I think that's one of the only sane ways to deal with these kinds of site-building tools. Their marketing suggests that they want you to embrace your creativity, but apparently, they only want you to do so on their terms. Seriously, if this project wasn't work-related, I would've just slapped it together on Neocities or Canva (though the latter is beginning to change, too).