James Andrews

Since it’s inception Wordpress has been customized and built into probably the most easiest CMS to use for maintaining website. The page administration is real simple to use. They have created a wonderful API that is simple to understand, so that even the most novice developers can jump in and get their hands dirty. I have fallen very much in love with that simplicity.

For the past few days I have thought that I wanted a new look for my website. I am not a designer. I can cobble together something that looks “ok-ish”, but that’s about it. I turned to a website that I have come to rely on when I need designs for personal projects. That site is called Themeforest.net. It allows you to buy designs, prebuilt HTML templates, and even Wordpress themes that you can use on your site un-exclusively. Now I could have gone and found a design, and coded all the HTML/CSS/PHP for myself, but I didn’t want to spend the time. I have other projects on my plate, so I thought I would simply find a Wordpress theme that was appealing purchase it and make a go of it. SIx hours of watching video.

While the theme is artistically pleasing, and full of all sorts of features it fails like so many other themes whose designers still see Wordpress as a blogging tool, and not a content management system. The home page is driven by blog category instead of it being a “page”. The javascript carousel is also driven by a category. While I can’t say that I feel it’s 100% wrong, I have had customers who have bought themes and became frustrated because the theme they bought didn’t support pages in the carousel, and then I had to figure out a way to fix it.

These designer/developers have to figure out that Wordpress is not just a blog, and that their customers do not want to rely on the blog aspect and categories to manage “pages” of a site when “pages” is already part of the Wordpress functionality.

I have spend too much time this evening hoping for a response on their forums, or my comment on Themeforest.net. Then trying to debug the code because I really wanted the new look up tonight. Alas, that is not the case. I have it at 99%, but am missing something stupid I am sure. Tomorrow is a new day, maybe I’ll 1) get a response with a fix, or 2) figure out what I am missing.