Some Organizations STILL Don’t Get It
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Whitney Potsus 04 February 2009 |
Categories: | • Trends |
| Comments: | 2 |
Not too long ago, Tom Johnson opened some old wounds for me with his post about WordPress’ biggest mistake—the mistake being the dearth of good documentation for WordPress users. It’s another example of how, in 2009, there are still organizations that don’t get the value of having a technical writer on the payroll, either as a staff member or a contractor, to make their products more usable and, therefore, more attractive to users.
Tom wrote: “WordPress documentation is only getting worse. Is there not at least a 100 page manual that you can download (rather than buying a third-party book from Amazon)? Blogger has much more marketshare because it’s an easier platform. WordPress could be more competitive in the marketplace if they simply hired a full-time technical writer to—I know this is shocking—add an online help file directly inside the application.”
I started a rant in his comments section, some of which I’ll repeat here. There’s a faction out there that insists that WordPress (the one you can host on your own site) is easy to use. So—if WordPress is easy, why is there a huge cottage industry of independent geeks and pros who do nothing but set up, extend, and troubleshoot WordPress for everyone else? If it’s so easy, how come some of these people get away, repeatedly, with charging folks $400 or more just to upgrade someone else’s WordPress blog to a new version?
Because it’s NOT.
I’m technically competent. I can replace a motherboard, install a second internal hard drive, set up a wireless network, put up a Web site, even do a little JavaScript (even though I hate it). I can do most anything with good documentation to refer to. But I find standalone WordPress to be obtuse. The scads of WordPress plug-ins make it difficult to tell what you really need, at minimum, unless you want to make learning about WordPress your new hobby—which I don’t. The so-called documentation makes it worse.
Speaking as a professional technical writer, the more complicated your product, the better your documentation needs to be. Speaking as a user and a consumer, the more complicated products and technologies become, the less patience I have with lousy documentation and the organizations who push it out there. Especially when I know how many talented, creative, reliable technical writers are out there and, at the moment, are out there looking for work.
The WordPress documentation needs to be better, as does the documentation for the plug-ins. The widespread use of WordPress demands better user support—a level that can’t be obtained by volunteers who write when they have the time. It requires a dedicated effort by a dedicated staff that works together to create a uniform documentation set. And if WordPress does, indeed, now have $29 million in funding, they can darn well afford a couple of technical writers.
Comments
I totally agree. Tried to use self hosted WP for our nonprofit's blog. Spent more time fighting with the plug-in setup than writing. Realized that if I ever left the publicity committee, the blog would probably get covered in cyber-dust because none of the non-techies would know how to handle WP. We switched to Typepad, mapped to our domain name, and have never looked back.Posted by CJ on 05 February 2009 at 08:22 PM
WordPress is not easy, but I would love to see someone at WordPress admit that. When I was setting up my blog, I went to WordPress first. My reaction was, WTF? I couldn't make heads or tails of it. I went to Blogger, and had my blog up and running in minutes.Posted by Craig on 27 February 2009 at 08:06 AM
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