6 basic frustrations when blogging with WordPress
I will not even tell you the countless hours I have spent into blogging. This is my third blog. I guess the more you do it, the better you become. And yet, it keeps surprising me how many frustrations I have had about something that should go eas(y/-ier) and be user-friendl(y/ier). So yes I have my share of frustrations and this is yet another article about this topic in which I share ‘6 basic frustrations when blogging with WordPress’.
Why are you blogging at all?
I do this because I love to do it: working with predefined templates and plugins to provide a nice layout and even more important, creating content. It makes me feel creative. This is basically what I want to do.
Why did you choose the WordPress platform for blogging?
I am not sharing a newsflash here but seems that it is not being said enough. WordPress is a huge platform. In fact it’s the biggest. Just Google it, the stats are impressive…
WordPress Took Over 112 Years to Build
Obviously that isn’t true because WordPress started in 2003, and you know, computers haven’t existed that long. It’s hard to tell just how many human hours it took to create the WordPress core, but that didn’t stop the people at Open Hub from trying. According to Open Hub’s Project Cost Calculator, WordPress took an estimated effort of over 112 person-years. This is based off of 423,759 lines of code, with an estimated cost of over $6 million to fund a project of this size. – Brenda Barron, January 18, 2019, (Full article at WhoIsHostingThis?)
There are a lot more stats showing how much there is involved into maintain and upgrading the wordpress platform. Yes, according to the development law in our modern society, everything gets better and better with upgrades after upgrades.
So what exactly are these frustrations about?
Of course this is not the point of this article… You need to know this about me: I am not a coder pure-sang but I am IT-savvy, well up to a certain extent. Assuming that you want to do this alone and not to rely on external specialists…
1. WordPress.com or WordPress.org, what to choose?
Ha! There is already starts… No, it’s not the same. There is a difference between the two platforms.
Not easy right? And maybe you do not want to do it there? Maybe you want to go for an external platform? You fancy to install it yourself on your own webserver, the one where you currently have your website and would crave to change that website into something nicer but you do not know how to go about?
2. Set up your WordPress platform in 5 minutes they say…
Without any help in the beginning, it’s almost impossible to avoid frustrations. With help I am not taking Google into account. It is, has been and will always be one of my best friends but some human intervention is needed at times. Anyways, we need to make a distinction between 2 ways of setting it up.
2.A. An external hosting
You need external hosting, i.e a location on a server where you can set-up wordpress so that you can use it to create articles. Of course you can use external webser hostings. There are some big ones also offering this. You might find the Wpbeginner instructions/guide useful here. Whatever is being told… it does not take 5 minutes to do this. You can see 30 minutes. For a complete beginner (not advanced IT-support) also 30 minutes is a bit too optimistic… I haven’t tested this yet for one simple reason: I have my own webhosting.
2.B. Your own hosting
I have my own webhosting. It started when my lifepartner decided that she wanted to renew her website. This is exactly what I did. She has her own service provider though. It gave me some headaches to figure out how to go about this but ok I managed and created her HR Concept website. Currently I am working together with labhosting.pl as they provide support in English and I am truly amazed by the level of service they offer. Also I am working with a programmer that helps me out a lot, thanks Przemek!
When you want WordPress on your own webhosting you need to download it and install it.
3. The latest WordPress version works best they say…
Lol… Do you really believe the newest of the newest is without any bugs or flaws?
I knew exactly what I had to do and yet, the installation on my hosting did not work at first. Seems that my server couldn’t handle the latest version of WordPress, or rather the latest version of WordPress had bugs and my server couldn’t handle those. Would you know it if noone would tell you? So it depends on which version of WordPress your server is able to support. Luckily you can install previous versions of wordpress.
4. WordPress is for free they say…
Yes it is correct, WordPress is for free in the sense that you are not charged for downloading or installing it. But honestly… Unless you do not mind putting up with tons of annoying advertising, do you know any website creation that is for free without advertisements?
Why is WordPress for free?
Because you need to take care of the setup and the hosting.
So what, a few bucks and that’s it, right?
Yeah sure… In the perfect world there would not be any hackers trying to show their skills in ‘Ethical hacking‘.
An ethical hacker (also known as a white hat hacker) is the ultimate security professional. Ethical hackers know how to find and exploit vulnerabilities and weaknesses in various systems—just like a malicious hacker (or a black hat hacker). In fact, they both use the same skills; however, an ethical hacker uses those skills in a legitimate, lawful manner to try to find vulnerabilities and fix them before the bad guys can get there and try to break in. – Jayanthi Manikandan, Last updated October 10, 2018, (Full article is at Simplilearn.com)
There are courses about how to become an ethical hacker. The idea is simple: if you can learn how to break in into someone else’s server/website, then you know what you need to do to secure the server/website. Security above all!
5. Plugins are for free they say…
There are more than 50.000 plugins at WordPress. Yes every basic plugin comes for free. Occassionally you have a plugin that is really for free with very good features, like the Sassy Social Share plug-in for example (showing the cool social media buttons that you can use to share this article). Of course there are more free plug-ins doing a great job but it’s a matter of finding them in the jungle of plug-ins. Also please give them a thumbs-up when giving them a nice review!
But in most cases, especially for plugins that have been downloaded 1000s of times, it’s a ‘Basic versus premium‘-thing, where the basic version is not even remotely enough. You are psychologically tricked into buying believing that it will benefit your website in the long run. This is especially the case for Internet marketing plug-ins.
6. Internet marketing plug-ins will bring you lots of visitors they say…
It depends if you are selling a product or a service or just writing just for the sake of producing yet another article on the web.
But in general, without any Internet Marketing plan and lots of effort to get your site/blog accross, this is doomed to fail epically. I have been reading about Internet marketing. Articles will be created on this blog as well. You need to know that it all is part of a huge concept in which plug-ins alone will not do anything at all.
Conclusions
I know it’s not only in the IT-area, but when you are working in IT, you are bound to face frustrations. The more you know about a topic, the more frustrations you encounter because of the million zillion possibiliteis. When creating blogs with wordpress or any other platform for that matter (?), it is no different. I have written this article since I created 3 blogs and on every occasion I needed help. Probably the frustrations is about the fact that I precisely needed this and that I failed to manage it on my own?! At any rate, I am learning (every single day) and probably this is the greatest pay-back that one can get.
Comments
Please leave your comment in the article below.
- Are there people who have experience with other blogging platforms than WordPress?
– If yes, how do you perceive the platform you are working with?
– Why would it be a great idea to start blogging in the platform you are working with?
– Why did you make the change from WordPress? - For the most of us bloggers, yes there is Google to be able to find information, but maybe you can share your advice (which is not necessarily written down) to be able to get into it faster.
– What are your experiences with blogging with WordPress?
– In what specific aspect of blogging with WordPress do you put most of your time, effort and energy into? - Any people have experience with external hosting?
A whole new world of frustrations opened up…
- Read about how I wasn’t able to login into my WordPress anymore. Luckily I was able to fix this while Googling but again it caused lots of time and energy to fix something that shouldn’t’ve had happened…
- Read about how I wasn’t able to upload plugins in WordPress anymore. I found several fixes but none except one helped.
