Is WordPress Killing Web Design?
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- utopian0
To date, I have not seen a WP template and or theme where I said to myself wow... that WP theme is innovative, fresh and creative!
- mnmlst0
Dumb argument.
CMS systems don't make bad designs, people make bad designs. If you're too lazy to bend a system too your will, that's your fault.
The discussion should be, "do CMS systems make some designers lazy?" Yes. But not the good ones. This whole discussion seems useless and fabricated to make controversy where there is none.
- utopian0
Web design is dead...
- raf0
Summary:
Use wordpress, or not. It limits your creativity, or it doesn't. We, self-appointed rockstar designers, rock.- ..and something pithy about CMS systems and handguns..TheBlueOne
- georgesIII0
with all that intelligent thought,
you woulda think the portfolio for where she works could have looked less like wordpress,
facepalm
- Boz0
yep.. most definitely.. every site looks the fucking same.. thanks to wordpress and drupal and all that crap we have lazy ass developers praising html5 and all that shit because it keeps everything in a box and simple for them.
I have yet to see any out-of-the-box thinking with wordpress cms or any other content management system. They are pretty images but flat and uninventive. Someone did some pretty graphics and slapped it into the wordpress theme. Most sites are like this these days.
- wordpress seems far easier to make it look un-wordpress-like than drupal to make un-drupal-like....vaxorcist
- You haven't looked very hard.404NotFound
- acescence0
how do you know you haven't seen any "out of the box" use of a cms? if you were to see it, how would you even identify that it was backed by a cms? blaming tools for lazy designers and developers? people enforce low standards, not tools. it's not the hammer's fault when your house falls apart. what it does do is lower the bar to entry and allow a bunch of clueless people to build websites and pollute the landscape with mediocrity, but at the end of the day it's people that are culpable, not their tools.
- I don't disagree.. but I have seen sites built on Wordpress and all of those I've seen are blah. You can sport WP immediately.Boz
- sport=spot WP immediately. You can recognize by looking at activity in Safari and similar whether or not it's WP site.Boz
- in most cases this is true, but i can build a site backed with WP where you'd be unable to ID it that way, I suspect others can as well.acescence
- as well.acescence
- Yes, you can spot WP sites with no creative behind it. But that's it.404NotFound
- Boz0
I don't disagree.. but that's the thing.. Wordpress and Drupal and Joomla are killing web design. They are also getting huge support from lazy developers because they don't have to think. They don't have to deal with "designers" and out-of-the-box thinking because they would need to work harder, write more code, actually think about the problem and how to make something work as imagined.
Nope.. most of them are so happy to see WP or similar because they've done it a million times, they can customize it and easy money with no effort really.
That's what the major problem is with these systems. I'm not hating on them, I'm just saying these systems have made it easy for everyone to crap sites out.
There are genuinely pretty websites (meaning with pretty graphics) built on WP.. We've built a lot of them (me and a lot of my friends and colleagues) but they are all the same in essence.
- what looks like boring crap to you happens to be usable. I'm Detrus btw.Pupsipu
- whatsup0
We need to destroy Wordpress so web design can flourish once again. Don't be slaves to the surrogate.
- silentseven0
Boz - I agree. I do think its an easy out. But I personally have built full flash experiential sites using Wordpress as a CMS and tying it in via XML, just cause the client was super familiar with Wordpress, and it turned out to be a very successful project.
Blaming the technology is kind of a lazy argument in my opinion. Status quo is perfectly fine for a lot of designers and developers but there will always be people pushing the dev and design. Then the masses will catch up and the cycle will continue from there.
- I bulit CMS systems for flash/XML and found it waaay more time consuming than budgets allowed for....vaxorcist
- Boz0
silentseven.. I totally get what you are saying with Flash/XML/Wordpress
but that's where the argument from the panel comes it.. you then have to hack Wordpress to make it output and do things you want.. At that point it's better to build a custom CMS that's going to allow client full control or every aspect of that experience instead of just trying to edit text.
I just built a full experience for the movie Catfish from Universal. I've built kind of an OSX replica in Flash with full xml based filesystem, dock, custom app additions, video player, photo viewer, text viewer and a ton of other stuff including private area database driven discussions boards . It took me 3 weeks of hardcore coding and working 18 hours or more a day but I don't think it would be even possible to do things we've done with Wordpress or these content mangement system.
The thing I hate is that we don't have to necessarily make super swoosh, bam, bang animations in websites but develop unique ideas of presenting information and experiences to the users.
With these CMSs you are sucked into frameworks that essentially don't let you innovate but you just comply to their functionality.
- Ya I think we are making the same argument. BTW nice work for gabe ;-)silentseven
- :) thanks.. yeah we had some sleepless nights on that oneBoz
- Ya I heard you guys had a fun time recreating the OSsilentseven
- auxillary0
+10 with the above!
- raf0
Wordpress has quite limited configurability out of the box and when you customize it heavily it usually becomes a maze for the client when he wants to update something via wp admin panel.
Then the client, afraid to break something, asks you to do his updates for which you bill him accordingly. It is some strategy, isn't it?
- acescence0
i find that most people who say things would be difficult in cms x or y or that you'd have to "hack" this or that simply don't know the tool well enough. writing a plugin on top of a framework isn't a hack. if 95% of the work is done and you just need the last 5% to output xml for instance, why go and rewrite the other 95%?
- yes... and sometimgs re-inventing the bugs they've fixed along the way too....vaxorcist
- raf0
I wish the most popular open source CMS with all of its plugins and free expertise available online wouldn't be wordpress.
I mean, wp might be a good starting point for a good CMS, but the problem with it is that every version of it maintains backwards compatibility, dragging bad code and UI decisions along with it for years.
Since we're on it... is there a really good and affordable CMS out there? Expression Engine? Textpattern?
- raf0
It's funny how much praise Wordpress gets, even if anyone who knows something about programming knows how shit it is and what people call "customizing" is akin to duct taping.
I use it for sure, but it's just another case of mediocre technology winning with better technologies.
VHS won with superior Betamax
HTML will win with superior Flash (I don't mind)
People need solutions that "just work" and can be fixed with just a hammer I guess. There's a lesson to be learned.
- Boz0
HTML can't win against Flash because they are not even in the same category.. not to mention that by the time HTML5 becomes even widely used and has good tools and IDEs, especially for canvas and webgl Flash will be exporting to those things anyways while still providing a larger feature set and the ability to write in AS3 or AS4 or whatever it will be 5 years from now when I expect HTML5 to actually be good for some commercial work instead of experimental 1990s stuff.
- donmiguesb0
I don't think wordpress is killing web design, web designers limiting their creativity so they can use a CMS like wordpress and drupal are killing webdesign. Just design and then adapt the CMS you are using to the design not the other way around. If you have a good programmer developer as a web designer you should not limit your creativity and have them work so the design you want comes to life.
- mydo0
What does wordpress have to do with web design?
you don't design sites in wordpress.wordpress gives people whom otherwise couldn't program a website the tools to do so.
Have you seen some of the stuff over at theme forest. For a clean simple corporate site, the designs are amazing quality.
so IMO wordpress is far from killing web design. it's like asking if the digital camera is killing photography? (which has probably been asked a lot)