Wordpress. Sayonara To Sloppy UX

After trying to help a friend with their blog set up recently I now have possibly the lowest opinion of Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org.

I've used a wordpress.com site as a backup for many, many years but never tinkered much or needed more than the sheer basics. I always found it lacking in clarity of it's user experience and for years seemingly bolting on menus and services to the point I just didn't use it.

Hence accounts I used were always free. I presumed the paid versions would be slicker and offer more.
Wow, was I wrong.

A good friend invested time and money in setting up a blog and paid for many of the premium features and designs.  They ran into some trouble, asked me for some help and after diving deeper to fix several issues, I am just stunned (to the point of writing words here) at the cluster%$*k express it has become.

A simply beyond sloppy and confusing UX and overly complex support. Wordpress.com vs. Wordpress.org? Ugh, who's running this, Microsoft? Reminds me of the six versions of Vista. Yes Six! Is that really what the customer wants? Or Microsoft and their email client naming; first it was Hotmail, then it was 'MSN' then it was 'Live', now Outlook.

Microsoft aside, Wordpress seem to also go out their way to avoid any support for Google products e.g. forwarding domain email to gmail, and don't try and add Google analytics to a Wordpress.com site. It's sacrilege it seems not to use their own stats. Lack of choice for customers yet again.

I understand Google is competition to Wordpress but people are confused and using a plethora of workarounds to try to get what they need. When you read the Wordpress support section you see so many  customers who pay the bills who are asking for solutions, simply get on many occasions snarky responses or support channels closed. I'm not alone in seeing this.

On principle the Wordpress sites I have, I'm shutting down, and recommend you do not use the service if you have not as yet. Blogger is my preference, and I'm sure many may poke holes in it, but you sure as hell won't waste much time working out how to get it to do what you want.