I’ll be honest with you. WordPress isn’t what I’d call user-friendly. Or, more precisely, it’s not this person’s idea of user-friendly. Seriously, the kind of “flexibility” that WordPress sites afford actually requires you to do a lot more work, because templates are all over the map. And, frustratingly, there’s a whole lot of bait and switch going on with template creators. They show off a really cool template, one that seems perfect for your site concept. Then, you download and install it, only to find that so much of it is extremely limited and behind a paywall. Not cool, kids, not cool at all.
What got us to this point was the fact that we broke down and used one of those pay-to-play template sites. Then the template we used made such a mess of our site data that it was impossible to go to a free template. The data and database was utterly destroyed. The reason we moved off of hosting our own webserver was to reduce the overhead, the work involved in maintaining it. Sadly, we’ve found that to be anything but the case.
The template we’re using now seems to be putting us right back into the same trap. What seem to be very basic functions to customize are completely behind a paywall. We’ll have to see how long we stick with this. But for now, here we are, rebuilding the site from scratch.
Wish us luck!