Avoid A WordPress Monster

Jun 14, 2010

A few weeks ago I was asked to train the Communications Manager at a school on how to use WordPress effectively.

I didn’t realise they had Communications Managers in schools these days! Having said that I left my local comprehensive in 1977 so things have changed since then.

Anyhow, back to the purpose of this post; I had a good look at the school’s website a couple of days before my visit and thought it was absolutely brilliant. Great theme with an effective colour scheme, lots of information about the school, posts from pupils and staff, Headmaster’s blog and much more. An excellent example of what can be achieved when using WordPress to its full potential.

The Communications Manager, Dave, had only been at the school for a few weeks and needed a guiding hand on how to make the most of what WordPress has to offer.

I arrived at the school nice and early and, after a couple of cups of coffee, I ran through the itinerary for the day.

We then got to work. In reality, it was more a case of we didn’t get to work!

Having logged into the site as an adminstrator I was very surprised to see WordPress version 2.7 was installed instead of the current version (at the time of writing this post) 2.9.2.

This was only the start.

Dave had tried to upgrade to the latest version. On each occasion the upgrade failed. It was failing because the site hadn’t been backed up. He tried to back-up the site on several occasions, but that failed each time too.

It got worse.

Although the site had several widgets in use in the sidebar he couldn’t access them via the Dashboard (the admin interface). They simple weren’t there to get at.

The real problem was the site had been custom-designed by Dave’s predecessor at the school. The guy clearly knew what he was doing, but hadn’t made the site admin friendly. OK, it was easy for him to use as he’d designed the site in the first place. However, there had been no consideration for anyone else having to take over the running of the site at some point in the future.

Dave was so concerned about his dilema that he asked the original designer to come into school to go through how the site worked. He declined. He was offered an almost open cheque to help. He still declined.

Unfortunately, there was very little I could do on the day to resolve the situation. I am not a developer or a designer (well, not really) and I certainly wasn’t going to start hacking into any code, as I didn’t want to be the individual who made the site fall over, and it will fall over very soon!

The site had been allowed to become a WordPress monster! An uncontrollable WordPress monster.

The solution?

My advice was pretty drastic. I suggested that the site should be scrapped and start again, after saving all of the important content to discs or flashdrives.

Why?

Dave (and his eventual successor) needs to have full control of the website, and in its existing form that will never happen.

Commissioning someone else to design a new, bespoke site isn’t the answer. I hate to say the school would be exploited, but a custom design is likely to be expensive and may not necessarily be easy to update when new versions of WordPress come along.

There are now hundreds of ‘premium’ themes available, many of which are so easy to customise. You are given enough flexibility to add a logo, change the colour scheme, add custom fields (to add thumbnails as an example), change fonts and much more. This can give you the appearance of a unique design, without having to drastically change the admin side of your site. In addition, the designer of this type of theme usually offers support if you run into problems.

I can strongly recommend Elegant Themes who offer an extensive range of excellent themes for only $39 (around £24) and you get access to all of them! They can be easily customised too.

If you feel you really want to invest in a unique design (and be prepared to spend several hundred pounds) make sure you have full access to the admin section of the site, so that you can easily add plugins and widgets without having to refer back to the original designer.

You should always be in control of your site. Not the other way round.