You Don't Always Get What You Pay For!
Remember that old saying “you get what you pay for”? Turns out that’s not always true.
Leaving all names aside, I recently ran into an organization that paid a web company a very large sum of money to build them a website. The main part of the site is in a content management system but the organization always wanted a blog. So, the web company that was hired I am sure did a Google search for the best blogging software and came up with WordPress and designed a WordPress theme that would match the rest of the site.
Here is the funny part.
The blog has 4 main authors and the homepage has a quick bio of the authors and their latest post next to the bio with a link to an author page. Now instead of doing the logical thing and setting up those author pages using the built in… well author pages… they set up actual WordPress pages for each author and put a giant if/else statement in the page template to match the author name with the correct information.
Whats more is the biographical information on the homepage is hard coded in, even though it’s identical to the information dynamically generated by WordPress…
Perhaps the best part of the website (warning, I am about to get technical) was the CSS. Now the method seemed to work but rather then using float left and float right to create a relatively simple two column layout, they decided to use position:relative for each div to put it in the right place. Of course, too much content in any place or an over sized image, completely breaks the layout.
The only reason I can come up with for all this is that the company wanted to make it so hard for this organization to change anything on the blog that they would be forced to hire the company to add or remove or change whatever they put on the site. I mean the organization had to go into the page.php file in the theme to change anything in the author’s bio and adding another author (or removing a current one) would have been impossible without some knowledge of php.
There seriously needs to be a comprehensive test for web designers and if you fail the test, you simply should not be allowed to build websites.
