[Techtalk] Helping non-techies with websites -- any experience?

[jadzia626 at gmail.com]

> Thanks for all the great replies! I guess I'll probably recommend
> Wordpress to the woman who's asking now, either at Wordpress.com or
> at some other site like Dreamwidth.
>
> Like Miriam, I personally find Wordpress to be way more difficult
> than just learning HTML (and way too complicated for a lot of the
> people I know who'd like websites). For instance, Leslie wrote:
>
>> A web developer friend advised that, with wordpress, it's possible to edit
>> the html/css as you like while still keeping the back-end code as is if you
>> have your own host and download wordpress as a freebie.
> I haven't found that to be the case. On the Wordpress site I
> help with, sure there's an HTML tab where you can type tags, but
> only a few tags are supported and the rest do unpredictable things.
> And there are a lot of other weirdnesses, e.g. all line breaks get
> turned into <br> so you can't include any formatting in your HTML.
> It would be a confusing way to learn HTML, and what you learned might
> not translate very well to anything outside Wordpress.

Well, if you want to do this, your best option is to write a child theme 
of whatever Wordpress theme you're starting from. If you want specific 
styles in your editor, you can add <span> and <div> based options with 
their own custom CSS class.

Personally, I just wrote a new theme from scratch. I've worked as a web 
developer though, so it was straight forward in my case. However, even 
if you're not experienced with the Wordpress API, the default themes 
written by Wordpress tend to be very good as reference. The 
documentation is pretty good too.

The benefit of writing your own theme is that you depend far less on 
plugins as you can just implement the functionality you need directly 
into your own theme. The Wordpress CMS is a bit bloated, but with no 
plugins aside from Jetpack, it works quite well. I stopped coding my own 
website(s) from scratch and replaced most with Wordpress in the end.

–Veronica