Wordpress: The Killer of Originality and Web Development
Disclaimer: Firstly, I would like to say that this post is not intended to come across as a 'digg' at Wordpress or Wordpress users. I think Wordpress has put together a fantastic CMS that is extremely hard to flaw. However, this post is merely an observation of what I feel the internet is becoming due to the introduction of Wordpress. So, here we go....
Wordpress, the internet's most popular blogging platform. It's free, it's easy to install and use. It looks great, has all the features you will ever need and it's easy to customise. It allows people who don't know the first thing about creating and designing websites to have a fantastic website with all the bells and whistles in minutes. However, is Wordpress killing website originality and web development? Is the internet becoming just a large collection of Wordpress blogs?
The Days Before Wordpress
Back when WordPress was just an idea scribbled on a notepad, web designers and developers worked together on every project to create websites. Web designers created fantastic outrageous designs which possibly tested a few new design ideas. Web developers would slice and dice these designs and apply tailor made CMS which may have also tested a few new and clever development ideas. You also had the individuals which had no choice but to learn both trades. No matter what the role someone played, they were creating something unique. Something they could call their own. Something that they could show off to their friends and say "Yea, I built that. Every line of code, every pixel".
It was these days that the internet was based on new ideas. It was exciting when you clicked on a link in Google to then see a site that was completely different from the site before. Every site had its own style, it's own methods of doing things. Every site was unique in one way or another.
I feel the web designers and developers had a lot more passion back then because they put every ounce of effort into every pixel and line of code. They knew their sites inside and out. If they wanted to try something new, they could without any problems with documentation, compatibility with framework, etc. It was exciting.
Then Wordpress Arrived
Perhaps Wordpress was not all that popular at first. It was probably as popular as the other free CMS out there such as PHPNuke, Zoomla, Drupel. But, Wordpress was better then all the rest. They had fantastic web designers and developers. They listened to the community that used their framework and built on top of it. It quickly evolved into the blogging platform we know today. I have to admit, I was even amazed at all the features and detail put into the framework. I hadn't seen anything built so rock-solid before. And because its so well-built, easy-to-use and featureful, so many people use it. And this is the problem with the internet today.
Originality is Dead
That's right, it's dead. You only have to do a search for a photoshop tutorial to be received by hundreds of Wordpress blogs. Every one of these have the exact same structure with possibly different theming. It gets boring. I know that when i click on the link that i'm going to get the blog post on the left with some sort of biggish date. Scroll down and you see the bog standard comments system that is so familiar because you saw it on the last 20 sites you visited. On the left you have about 6 square adverts, a box asking you to subscribe to the RSS feed and perhaps a couple of more boxes for related and popular posts. It's boring and every site just starts to blend into each other. Surely the design and placement of items could be a bit more 'fluid'. Why don't Wordpress designers try new structure ideas out? No, we will have to wait for the one renegade designer who feels very much the same way as I do to show the rest of the Wordpress blogging community that there is something better than the existing structure.
Web Development is Suffering
Yep, not dead, but suffering. It seems that now days people aren't interested in web developers if they don't know how to build plug-ins for Wordpress. Since when did wordpress become the industry standard for websites? I had a scenario where someone approached me about having some trouble with PHP coding. He had been working all week trying to get some layout issue sorted using a WordPress plugin. He asked me if I could do it. Yeah, I could do it, but I would need to have a look at how wordpress worked. I never heard anything from him again. However, this layout issue would have been easily resolved using a custom build CMS, something that the web developer and perhaps the site owner turned web developer would know how to fix because he built it. Now days, web developers are spending more time coding for framework like WordPress that there is hardly any conceptual ideas being thrown about anymore. Now, i'm not saying that todays web developers are crap, because they aren't. I'm saying that I think that the next generation of web developers/designers are going to be highly affected by our generations creations because we have built systems so they don't have to code or be original anymore because a framework will do it all for you now.
Why Reinvent the Wheel?
Good point. However, websites are not exactly the wheel. They are much more complex. Things can always be improved. No doubt, something will be introduced which will take over the throne Wordpress has. But that will only happen if some renegade web designers and developers decide not to conform to the 'industry standard' that is Wordpress.
You Hypocrite
Whoa, SDWD looks like a wordpress site. Yes, it does LOOK like a wordpress site in structure. However, the code is my own and therefore I will be able to build customised solutions as I need it without needing to conform to someone else's framework. And, if I wanted to flip things upside down or move content around I could do alot easier and quicker then someone who is using a framework they didn't build.
I Conclude...
Web design and development will always progress because there are always some individuals that prefer to keep it 'old-school' and do it all themselves. However, it just may take a little longer because there is perhaps less of these kinds of people around as everyone else is paying more attention to creating things for Wordpress and other frameworks. So I conclude with this...Don't opt for Wordpress just because its the easy option or because everyone else is doing it. If you can do it yourself, do it. You will gain alot of knowledge and experience by doing it yourself then if you were to use some pre-made plug-n-play framework.
I leave you with 1 Question
What do you think?
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Comments
Good feedback. However, my thought is that Wordpress is killing web development's....developement. This is because so many people are opting for Wordpress rather then getting their hands dirty and learning a bit of custom code and trying out new ideas away from wordpress. Therefore, pehaps the next generation of web developers will simply be wordpress developers because they hardly ever spent anytime on anything outside of Wordpress.
I just wanted to say that I utterly agree with you. I'm sick of all those morons throwing together a site via Wordpress and saying "Wow look at how cool I am!" Like I give a crap. Lol.
I spent a good amount of time putting together my site and while parts of it didn't quite come out right I still learned a lot and loved every minute of it. And then, we go to the journalism convention to compete with other schools and I'm the only person who isn't using a framework?! This pissed me off but left me feeling much better about myself and my originality :)
Just had to thank you for this post!
-Brennan
Just imagine if Facebook, Twitter, Google or Yahoo was based off a pre-built framework.
I am a beginning developer and wordpress didn't affect me even if it is easier to learn, but also I would like to learn some other frameworks as Zend or CodeIgniter, just to know how code is organized, then maybe I'll create my own. My opinion is that wordpress will be used just for some peronal use , and that it is not good for some big projects.
Everyone learns by example, just make sure you improve on those examples to create a better website.
First off, thanks for the article. It held my attention till the very end. Very intriguing.
Second off, my opinion: I use WordPress for my site, and that's blatantly obvious - but without it, I would have just been scared off by people showing me their own frameworks they coded themselves. Before WordPress, all code - even HTML - seemed foreign to me. Now, well, I'll be honest - it's still a bit confusing. But the fact of the matter is, I would have never touched this stuff if WordPress hadn't existed. If I had read this article a year or two ago, I wouldn't have made it past the first paragraph, because I'd have read the first sentence and thought, "I have no idea what a framework is. Back to facebook."
My opinion is that WordPress is a great way for users to, and pardon the analogy, ease their way into the swimming pool step-by-step as opposed to jumping in off the high dive and building their own framework right off the bat.
I've read most of your replies above, and I agree, I may outgrow this someday and I may go on to build my own framework. But for now, I'm in 3 feet deep water, and I'm determined to get down to that deep end.
Very valid point. And I suppose for those who aren't ready and even interested in coding languages and learning how websites truely work, a prebuilt framework like WordPress is ideal.
I suppose the difference between you and me is that I started building websites because I wanted to know how they worked and at the time there were only a couple of frameworks which most didn't do what I wanted to the fullest anyway. My only option from the start was build my own.
Wordpress is so tempting to the beginner webmaster/web developer/web designer because all the hard work is done. Suppose its how you wish to approach the web and what your main interests are. If its getting a blog type website going, then perhaps Wordpress is ideal. But if you want to break out of the mold, Wordpress will only get in the way.
A Reader
27 Jun 2009 04:20:35 AMBefore there were blogging and CMS platforms such as Wordpress etc, it was hard for non tech savvy users (especially those on a very tight budget) to set up a website. The personal voice of those people could not be heard - be it to do with human rights, their Photoshop tutorials, or simply what they had to eat that day. They were limited to things like MySpace.
These days, ANYONE can quite easily create a website using wordpress, theme it, and off they go.
I never get inquiries about building anything wordpress related. The work I attract is for large bespoke CMS driven projects. Far from making us conform to wordpress' framework, I think it's freed us, so we can work on true applications, while Joe Blogger can create his own site and be happy. It allows us to shine and show off our bespoke work when you compare it to a wordpress based site.
In short, it's given people who wouldn't normally have had a web presence a website, it's set a benchmark to at least match, and it allows us to say 'Yeah, wordpress is fine, if your making a blog - but if you want something unique, I can build that'.
If the only work you are attracting is wordpress modification etc, then I think you need to think about how you market yourself, and the places you look for work!