My WordPress Experience

I’m still searching for the best solution and service for my personal web site and blog. After trying Google’s Blogger, Microsoft’s Live! Space and Office Live for Small Business I ended up with WordPress. Unfortunately, not everything is as I would like it to be, especially when it comes to the following issues:

1. Theming is nice but when the themes include several errors and does not recognize the importance of printability, it’s more or less useless. There is an option of creating your own CSS, but then you’ll have to pay an annual fee. I don’t want to pay to fix other developers mistakes.
    
2. Compared to both Blogger, Live! Spaces and Office Live, the flexibility within the pages are very low. The theme defines which page templates that exist and how they work. If you need to change anything you just have to forget it (unless you want to pay another fee to WP). It’s not possible to decide which widgets you want on each page and all widgets you add to your site will appear on all pages with a widget placeholder.
    
3. There is no contact form available. This should be one of the most basic features of any site. I know I don’t want to publish my e-mail address, but would like my visitors to have the ability to send me an e-mail from the server application. However, even if all other similar services have this feature, WP does not.
    
4. I would like to have my own URL, and since I already own the Wikmark.name zone, I would have thought blog.wikmark.name was easy to accomplish. But again I was wrong, at least if I don’t pay another fee. Besides, it’s cheaper to have WP register a new domain than it is to use an existing domain, something I found quite odd.

It seems like WP is something like Ryan air. The basic service is free, but if you require a seat with your flight you will have to pay extra. Oh, you wanted a knife and fork with your meal? That’ll be $2 extra please.

So, how come I ended up with WP anyway? First of all, I don’t trust Google. I don’t want them to host my ideas and stuff I write and create, thus Blogger was excluded. Microsoft on the other hand I trust, but the services they deliver are hard to use, not standardized and lacks of basic features as well. Besides, who actually uses Microsoft’s public services for real? So the answer is more or less that WP was the “least bad” service to use. Hopefully this will change in the future.

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