Adobe Dreamweaver has virtues — better control for beginners than WordPress offers is one

© 2016 Peter Free

07 June 2016

 

No joy for non-coders — pick the kind of website design pain that you want

WordPress and Adobe Dreamweaver were both invented to assist non-coding folk in designing websites and adding content to them. After three weeks of messing with WordPress, I’ve decided that Dreamweaver gives me more control, more easily, than WordPress does. This is the reverse of most people’s experience.

Part of my finding probably has to do with my insistence on achieving acceptable aesthetics and an easily navigable site. WordPress navigation (using prebuilt themes) on mobile devices almost invariably comes at the expense of aesthetics. Decent looks pretty consistently arrive with a near complete lack of common sense.

Adobe 1 – WordPress 0.

 

Of note to writers

WordPress theme designers frequently screw up the appearance of text. For instance, with block quotes.  I have seen some themes that use gigantic quotation marks, absurd font changes, italics, text centering (or text justification)  — all together on the same block.

The result is ugly and virtually unreadable.

And what’s up with all the non-standard ways of spacing lines of text? Why do I have reformat all my posts, just to get them to look non-idiotic, when going from one theme to another?

With Dreamweaver, once I have created a simple page template, I just paste in a Microsoft Word document and everything looks like it did in Word. How convenient is that?

 

Dumb WordPress navigation

Why do so many WordPress sidebar designs list archives well ahead of categories? Or not permit a list of categories at all?

Who (for instance) is going to want to plumb April 2014, when she could instead go to a category heading that would more reliably get her into the correct ballpark?

Similarly, why do so many themes put navigationally necessary entries at the bottom of the page?

On text heavy sites, no one is going to have the patience to scroll down to look for them. Especially on a smartphone.

 

Most frustrating are WordPress themes that are almost good enough

They often make it challenging to find the code that needs to be tweaked. Thank goodness for Mozilla’s wonderful Firebug plugin. It assists users in seeing what went where.

Shortcodes — essentially macros that substitute for “properly” constructed, repetitive coding — aggravate this situation. When shortcodes are used, it is not obvious how to change specific aspects of their actions. Which is what I often want to do.

 

Stupidity reigns?

Theme descriptions are generally vague. They are generally useless for anticipating what the user might be able to modify to better suit her needs.

The few theme designers, who do provide links to the administrative portion of their themes, still leave it unclear as to which portions of the thematic layout are affected by the usually minimal changes they permit.

In other words, you have to install and activate these themes on your website to experiment and discover what works and what does not. This is always time-consuming. And sometimes expensive.

 

WordPress page builders — not a big help

My weeklong experience with BeaverBuilder Pro was disappointing. The application is supposed to make WordPress experimentation easy. But the application was annoyingly buggy and sometimes impenetrably non-intuitive. This combination made it among the most frustrating bits of software that I have ever used.

My use of third-party themes (for aesthetic reasons) may have interfered with BeaverBuilder’s potential. BeaverBuilder may work well for someone (a) who codes from scratch and (b) wants an efficient way to add modules.

That said, SiteOrigin‘s no cost page builder (which comes with an array of widgets) proved to be more intuitive and more reliable in operation for my purposes. Although even it does not overcome WordPress's inherent control limitations.

 

The moral? — Back to learning code and proceeding from scratch — or using Adobe Dreamweaver

If you want it done right (or closer to right), do it yourself.