I recently came across a discussion on a web developer Facebook group. Someone had asked a somewhat simple question: Do you think there’s a need to use a CMS on every client projects?
My answer to that is relatively simple: In my web agencies days, countless times, a client would ask us to make everything editable. Making our dev work harder and longer, sometimes even with some design limitations. When the project was completed, usually two things would happen: either the client would call us to update the website because he didn’t have time to do it or he would just update a page once every 6 months.
It depends on the type of project or the type of client you are working with. That’s the key here: everyone has a different background and different previous experiences.
A guy, let's call him Max, was heart & soul defending the use of CMS and mainly Wordpress; how fast and easy it was for his clients to update their project. Everything should be editable by the client, bar none. Max couldn’t concede anyone was doing any real work without Wordpress (or a CMS).
The problem here is the amount of condescendence he had when explaining his rationale. He was so disrespectful and ridiculed others for thinking differently than him. Telling to go back “Learn the web” before replying again. Calling people out by names. How you must be stupid for not using Wordpress [sic].
At one point, Max even said to another dev: Your replies make me want to punch you in the teeth. WHAT?
Don’t get me wrong: I love confidence. I love that you can have a strong opinion on a subject. You can talk about the ins-and-outs of Wordpress, that's great! I don’t think you can’t make it far in this industry if you have passion but communication is key. When I used to teach to young designers, one of the things I would tell them to remember is this: communication skills are as essential as your main craft. You can be the best designer in the world, but if you can’t explain yourself or sell your ideas, the best communicator will always win over you even if the work is less good.
What's even worse is that Max had good arguments, he was making sense. Wordpress is indeed great for many situations, especially in the advertising/marketing industry. And yes, it's a CMS used by many, yes it's easy to find resources online. Had he stayed respectful, others would have learned a thing or two. Others would have probably agreed with him.
Instead, he became irrelevant. No one wants to deal with such a character. His ego was so big that his arguments were lost in the wild. Everyone stopped listening. Only because he wasn't able to communicate well.
It’s essential for your career to master how to communicate and to stay open-minded. People will continually have different views than yours. Listen to them first. Make your point after. Help them understand your point of view. If they don’t; at least you tried. Stay humble. You will start getting people’s attention. There’s no place for condescendence. Ever.
Top comments (6)
Wordpress is indeed great for a couple of situations:
If you want to get hacked - no other CMS has as awful technical architecture making it super easy for you to get hacked repeatedly.
If you want a slow site - again bad design makes Wordpress a chore performance-wise, and it takes a ridiculous amount of effort to make a Wordpress site perform reasonably well just most of the time, not to mention when caches expire.
I really wish people would stop claiming it's a wonderful system that needs to be used everywhere, when it quite clearly has shown time and time again to be one of the worst designed CMSes out there.
Also "Max" sounds like they shouldn't be working with people, period. Maybe they should find a nice job monitoring a research station at one of the earth's poles, or similar remote location.
Even if I agree with your comment, I think you should try to think as a non-developer and focus instead on a marketing/design point of view: sometimes they don’t have that kind of technical skills, but they know they can deploy a new wordpress with a custom template and a bunch of plugins in at least 4-16 hours. Too slow? Pay for a bigger hosting/box. Hacked? Damn hackers! 🤷🏻♂️
I’ve seen tens of web agencies running on WP (or Joomla) without needing a developer. I don’t like it, but it works for many.
I think those kinds of people definitely should stay away from systems that really require an experienced person to set up properly and just use some of those online website builders.
They tend to be even easier to set up and operate, and less problematic in terms of performance and hacking issues. Probably even cost less than hosting WP.
Ignoring Max is the weak response of people who cannot communicate either. He can definitely not shittalk other people but there should be a handful that have the confidence to face him and tell him he sucks. That or he is right. It's not ok for him to have bad manners but if no one has never any argument for him and everyone is unable to deal with his behavior, it's more showing your team's failure to communicate than his. If the solution becomes to ignore him then that's a failure. I'm really surprised that a full team of devs would behave like that. If you're still scientists looking for truth there should be either right or wrong and your knowledge should be able to dismiss wrong and accept right. If he was right then you should convince yourself he was. But obviously he wasn't, so anyone should be able to prove him wrong. What happened is everyone stopped caring about truth, the new value became comfort, and in my opinion this is both lazy and sad
In other words, ignoring Max is reality.
Ignoring max is a social failure in itself