I began my career many years ago as a mainframe COBOL programmer.  One of the hardest parts about programming on the mainframe was creating the user interface; consequently, an industry soon sprang up to create software which would automatically generate the code for the user interface.  The programmer then just had to write the unique business function code required for that particular application.  This greatly simplified the task of programming, as long as all your applications were similar and easily fit into the functions of the standard user interface code which was generated.  In the 21st century things haven’t changed all that much.  There are many software packages designed to automate or simplify specific programming tasks.  As long as you keep your designs simple and follow their paradigm things work very well.  Unfortunately, in the real world users don’t always want simple designs and they definitely don’t always want to follow prescribed processes or paradigms; they often want to create something unique and all their own.

Thus it is with WordPress.  I love the simplicity with which I can quickly throw some words and pictures together and crank out a simple blog post.  The software is tailored directly for this particular process and enables a beginner to quickly come up to speed and set up a blogging site with little training.  If you don’t like style of your blog, you can experiment with the many free templates or even invest in a premium template to get the look that you want.

Unfortunately, when you start trying to move beyond mere blogging, things can become more difficult.  Several years ago, my sons decided to create a charity bike ride for a friend of theirs who had Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome.  I had this brilliant idea, that I could quickly throw up a WordPress site so they could not only blog their trip, but collect pledges/donations from people on a per mile basis (http://twelvenineride.org/2014/07/16/day-1-a-bumpy-ride/).  I found a theme and threw in a twitter plug-in which allowed them to tweet from the road so that people could see their progress in real-time.  Everything was going pretty well until I tried to add in the e-commerce donation piece.  I remember spending several late nights and early morning hours working on it.  I wanted people to be able to click on the donation amount in a table based on a per mile figure and pass that amount directly into the donation page.  I passed the amount to the donation page but it would never show up in the donation amount box, so I ended up displaying the table and just putting a “Donate” button underneath it that took you to the donation page where you had to key in the donation amount.  In the end it worked well enough to raise about $8,000; nevertheless, it left me feeling very frustrated that I couldn’t get it to behave exactly like I wanted it to.

I think for small to possibly some medium size businesses that WordPress can be a good choice if you’re willing to adjust to its quirks.  For a larger enterprise or a small business with a picky owner that wanted his website to look or behave just so, I probably won’t recommend it.