James Mowery

@Carl Hancock – Hey Carl,

I primarily agree with your comments speaking to the complexity of WordPress. WordPress certainly isn’t harder than what it used to be. However, I think there’s more to it than that.

Complexity wise, I don’t think WordPress has changed all that much. If anything, WordPress is much simpler than what it once was back when I first tried installing it on a VPS many years ago.

I can’t say this definitively, but I believe it’s a realistic statement to say that there’s an increasing desire from non-technical people to get started in online publishing. People want their own chunk of the Web, and when people eventually get fed up over the lack of control (and that terrible identity system that Yahoo has) that comes (or will come) with the likes of Tumblr, or when Medium maybe turns into a failed Twitter experiment like their music project, or when PostHaven possibly suffers the same fate as its predecessor, Posterious… where will those users go?

I hope those users recover, learn their lesson, and make the decision to take control of their content. To completely own it. And to make their own home on the Web that they fully control. And I hope it’s all powered by WordPress.

Unfortunately, I’ve talked to people at conferences — particularly at WordCamps and at New Media Expo — who have told me they want to get started with WordPress but have no idea what they are doing. In their eyes, it’s far too overwhelming — they don’t know where to begin or what to do. They don’t understand the differences between .com or .org, nor have the understanding to make that decision. “What plugins do I need?” “Which permalink structure is ideal for SEO?” “What on earth is a trackback?”

To me that’s depressing. They have no idea what they are doing at times, and yet they are contemplating all these far more complex things that they probably shouldn’t even be worrying about quite yet. I’m sure there’s some intelligent law or theory made up by a psychologist or economist that describes this issue.

The perception — and I’m a strong believer in the power of perception — that WordPress gives off when experiences it for the first time is probably power and control. But that inherently stirs up ideas of complexity.

Of course, it isn’t WordPress’ duty to appeal to all these people. You can’t appease everyone, everywhere.

But I want people to be comfortable. The interface, as it stands, could do a significantly better job of this. I then hope that those people who feel this comfort for the first time eventually expand their usage so they eventually start pursuing the ideas of plugins. I want them to snag up GravityForms, I want them to see the great value in ManageWP, and I want them to make their site look beautiful with a high quality theme made by someone who cares about the WordPress ecosystem. If they need a certain piece of functionality in the future, they should then be comfortable in finding a plugin, knowing its pros and cons, installing it, and properly maintaining it.

I feel WordPress can certainly can make the experience far less overwhelming for people who are not as technically inclined as you or I or many people who read and comment on this blog post ever will be.

I’m not saying I know exactly how to do that, and I know it’s not an overnight operation. It’s something that has to be done with great care and compromise. But I hope it’s done in a way so that everyone benefits, and that people who are new to WordPress can dive right in without having to see the guts, and those who understand the platform can tweak it to their heart’s content.

My hope is that, in the end, these types of changes will be a very good thing for everyone involved. :)

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