WordPress – You’re Hired!

Checking my statistics, I still see a lot of hits coming in from the Joomla! forums. This is not surprising at all considering that I spent a lot of time there and posted weekly for almost a year as I developed the Girls Can’t WHAT? web site. It also helped that I had a very popular “New Site” thread that spawned a ton of compliments and suggestions. However in January of this year, I moved completely away from Joomla! and am now using WordPress to power the Girls Can’t WHAT? site. Moving my entire site from one platform to another took about 4 days. Considering I only “work” about 6-7 hours a day…well, you can do the math.

If you are not a geek the rest of this article will bore you, if you haven’t already fallen asleep at your monitor. For the geeky among us, let me walk you through my decision to switch from Joomla! to WordPress.

Joomla! rocks, there’s no doubt about it. It is outstanding Open Source software, but maintaining it was sucking up all of my time. Towards the end of last year, my Girls Can’t WHAT? Gift Shop sales started to soar and requests were coming in every week. I knew almost immediately that I needed to shift my focus from building and maintaining the web site to designing new characters for the shop and taking on custom orders. I never intended to switch software, but I knew something had to give in the web development area in order to free up creativity time for new designs.

The first step in my quest for simplicity was to streamline my Joomla! site. I restructured it to be more blog-like and dumbed-down the menus and categories. People liked it and more new members joined. But I was still hassling with updates and some component bugs, especially in the area of comments. It seemed as soon as I fixed something, there was an update that broke something else. Ugh.

Don’t get me wrong, I actually enjoyed the bug squashing and working with developers to fix components and modules, but the business manager in me was shaking her head and saying “You are spending way too much time in this area. You can’t afford to hire a web developer. Time to move on.” After a couple of months, I finally started to listen to that voice and began weighing my options. What was the purpose of my site? What was I trying to achieve? What is working? What isn’t? What do my members want?

On a whim one day (I do a lot of things “on a whim” – I like to experiment) I downloaded WordPress to my local drive and started playing with it. It took less than 15 minutes to setup. I never read any instructions (never do anyway) and within an hour I had setup a theme, rearranged the layout to my liking and installed a half dozen plug-ins or so. Pretty sweet. Now for the real tests…

Speed

One of my main criteria for the site was speed. I need to be able to get in, add my content and get back to drawing new designs. Speed, speed, speed! WordPress has this aspect nailed. It’s fast. The search function within the admin panel is fast as well. Another consideration is being able to add (multiple) categories, tags and other things on the fly. Speed is hugely important to me as a business owner needing to get things done and get them done quickly.

WordPress Doesn’t Log Me Out

Unless I want it to, which is rare. I can leave it open in my browser all day and just add things here and there. I have NEVER lost a post because WP timed out on me. That was a huge plus. I can’t tell you how many amazing creative writing sessions I lost in Joomla due to time outs. Out of fear, I resorted to typing articles in an Open Office doc and pasting into Joomla. Ugh – that was too much overhead for me.

RSS/Trackbacks/Pings/etc.

One of the biggest struggles I had with my site while using Joomla! was feeds. After a long battle, I finally got feeds to work by using a third party component. This worked for a while but then suddenly one day it stopped working. Same with trackbacks. One day it worked, one day it didn’t. I can’t deal with that kind of inconsistency. RSS feeds need to work – all the time. With WordPress, all of these things worked right “out-of-the-box” without a single plug-in or tweak to the code. That was a huge relief to me. When I took the WordPress site live, the hits I got from blog sites like Technorati and Squidoo took a huge leap upwards. My RSS was suddenly feeding them a consistent diet of fast food and they were “loving it”.

Working Editor

The first thing I noticed about the WordPress editor is that there were NO pop-ups! Everything was right there in a simplified toolbar and switching to the code was just a single click away. Inserting images was a snap. The entire experience of editing a post was quick and painless. There’s that speed factor again. And if that isn’t enough, editing an already published post is a piece of cake. Let’s say I am browsing the home page of my site and I see that there is a typo in an article I want to fix. All I have to do is click on the edit link next to the post (assuming I am already logged in on the site – otherwise there is no edit link showing) and I am taken immediately into the admin panel ready to edit that post. I make the changes, click ‘save’ and I am taken instantly back to the home page where I started. Speed again. Add to that the editing window had a drag-n-drop resizable window so you can eliminate scrolling and you have near perfection.

Intuitive Interface

User interface is much more intuitive. There is a link to write a post on the “manage” page. The admin panel makes sense to me. I don’t have to search for anything because I intuitively find it the first time. Speed.

The Amazon Plugin Rocks!

I promise not to stray too far off of the basic WordPress installation, but I have to say that this plug-in is very cool. Even if you are not an Amazon affiliate, it is worth setting up just to be able to pull in images from amazon. Let’s say I am promoting a new artist and I want to display the album cover in my post. With this plug-in, I can find the item from Amazon and insert whatever size image I need right from the admin panel while editing the post. No switching editors or typing in some code. I don’t even have to visit Amazon’s site! The image is inserted and is already linked back to Amazon in case a visitor wants to purchase it.

The Comments WORK

I can’t stress this one enough. With WordPress, comments are a built-in part of the program. They work. All the time. This was my biggest headache with Joomla! My comments were broken every other week. I hated it. My users hated it. And they told me they hated it. Spam was another issue. I got a lot of it. With WordPress, the spam protection with Akismet and Bad Behavior is fabulous. I don’t even have to do any maintenance to clean out the blocked spam. It will be deleted for me automagically after 15 days. What a dream!

No more \ Girls Can\’t WHAT?

The title of my business, as you know, is Girls Can’t WHAT? It has an apostrophe and a question mark in it. For whatever reason (it was explained to me once but that didn’t “fix” anything), Joomla liked to put in a backslash in there. I would often have to write in the ascii codes for the apostrophe to get it to display properly. With WordPress, it just works. Bye-bye Ascii codes. I won’t miss you.

Page Rank and Google

I was a bit concerned about how Google would react to my changes. Afterall, ALL of my links would be changed to WordPress PermaLinks (which work without tweaking). I figured I’d lose page rank, get penalized for duplicate content or get lost in the sandbox. None of the above happened. In fact, I think Google actually rewarded me. My PageRank went up a point and the most popular article on my site at the time (which was Martina McBride’s Anyway Video) was #1 in several Google searches with in 24 hours. I didn’t miss a beat. The other search engines took a few more days and weeks to catch up, but Google had my back.

Multiple Categories

I mentioned this previously, but it is a key point. Being able to tag an article with multiple categories is very useful. This works with the basic WordPress setup. No plug-ins required.

Go Back – Now!

The back button on my browser works and I use it a lot. With WordPress, there are no “are you sure?” messages it just goes there. And it goes there fast. Did I mention the speed factor?

For The Non-Geeky

I know this may be hard to swallow, but there are people out there that use the Internet and who do not have an ounce of geekiness in them. My friend, Kelli is one such person. Kelli likes the Internet and spends a lot of time surfing, but she never got the hang of my Joomla! site. Kelli had no trouble navigating my site, but she wanted to participate. How could she participate when things were frequently broken? I tried explaining to her that in order to make the comments work she needed to clear her her cache. She replied “I’m not giving you any money”. Then I told her to clear her cookies and she said “cookies are for eating”. Kelli also wanted to add her own blog articles to my site, but the admin panel confused her. I am proud to say that since switching to WordPress, Kelli has logged in and posted her own articles. And I didn’t even have to coach her! There are other “Kelli’s” out there that don’t speek geek either. They are now posting effortlessly on my site.

The Move

After deciding to take the plunge in to WordPress, my main concern was moving content from Joomla! to WordPress. I had well over 400 content items to contend with. Fortunately, I found a WordPress script that made the move rather painless and quick. In fact, I think it took all of 10 minutes to download, install and run the utility.

The next issue was the template design. I tweaked a couple of templates in different colors before deciding on my current theme. I don’t know if it’s a WordPress thing or just the nature of my new layout, but my CSS sheet was a lot easier to manage and much smaller in size than the ones I used in Joomla! I think that may be due to having to add in lines of CSS every time I added a component or module in Joomla. So far with WP, I have only added a few minor plug-ins and only one of them required adding a line of code.

The Decision

I have nothing against Joomla! I still support Joomla! In fact, I built two other sites that still use Joomla! and it works for them. My site has not suffered at all. In fact I don’t think I even missed a beat (I’m a drummer – I would know if I missed a beat -lol). Joomla has it’s strengths and weaknesses as does WordPress. As a business owner, I had to consider those strengths and weaknesses and make the best choice for my scenario – which is a small business owner with no employees.

Ultimately, my move from Joomla! to WordPress was purely a business decision. Switching to WordPress was like hiring an administrative assistant. It handles tasks quickly and easily and without complaint. It’s there when I need it and never falls asleep. I don’t have to spend time with upgrades and/or bug fixes. It’s reliable. Without it I would be less productive, and that’s something I just can’t afford to be. WordPress – You’re Hired!

Joomla! vs WordPress