WordPress – Website Builder

The site on the laptop and accessing it on my mobile device (iPhone) is horrible. The two don’t connect and it’s telling me that the domain that I paid $300 to Wordpress for doesn’t exist. Yet I can do everything on my MacBook.

This app is good, it needs more options like Widgets, adding a SideBar, even a Contact Form as well!

This is my first series

The search tool crashes when you try to search in the app or it will go very slow.

I’m having a hard time understanding the pricing for upgrading. I am getting one quote and then at checkout, a much higher amount. Such as $12.00 ends up costing $60.00. I am only interested in a personal site. I also keep getting error messages when I try to upgrade and can’t even pay. What the heck is this? I should be able to get the price I am offered. I guess for now I will just stay with the free one.

Having this app in my phone would be so useful if it worked! I’ve had if for years and it’s always struggled. I’m trying to search my posts and it says the recent ones have all failed and I can’t see my history of posts. Then I tried to open my pages and all it does is say “fetching” and keeps scrolling. I don’t know why I haven’t deleted it yet. I’m secretly hoping it’ll work.

WordPress could be a lot better. This new Gutenberg editor is a loser. My gosh, you can’t even indent a sentence without going through contortions. Clearly, WordPress needs to improve its editor so that it works for regular people, not just professional programmers. Our money is just as good as a professional, programmer’s money. I also do not like the user unfriendly clinical look that Wordpress displays. I don’t like the blue and black color to the administrative tools. Why not something a little more cheerful? At times, it is difficult to find the right tool you need in order to edit things. The right tools are often buried in a sub menu. I feel like I am finding the right tools that I need by trial and error every single time that I look for them. I suspect that the person in charge of the design is a programmer or a mathematician, who has no concept of design whatsoever..

I’m not a computer person except for the basics. I am however highly proficient in comprehension and putting the context of what I have learned into action. It has occurred to me that in order to understand and follow through with the construction of a coherent website, it’s not enough. If you don’t understand the vocabulary, then it becomes like a foreign language. Turning to the WP Tutorial Videos, you’ll find that you have to know exactly where every little piece of content is in the editor to get the most out of them. If not than you will find yourself hitting the pause button too many times to catch up and learning becomes 2nd to trying to keep up. The instructor moves the tutorial way too quickly let alone does not introduce the specific words and meanings to somewhat pre-prepare onlookers. It is also very useful to note that there are two different ways to develop your site and as to which one is supposedly more geared for the beginner, I am quite stumped. They are both presented in a way that is not geared toward a first time user. I have been trying to make sense of the information for a couple of weeks now. I have a creator account and access to the happiness engineers but have yet to figure out how to make use of them outside of emails which are usually arriving about 24 hrs later in which I have already forgot what my issue was, and then end up back at square one with reading something that is a foreign language. So it seems that avenue fails me as well. I have the option of paying $500 to have my website designed for me and then I would be set. Well, as a one man show business starter, $500 isn’t exactly within my budget. I have no idea how trim the fat per sey to make room for that budget so I am just toughing it out in hopes that finally something clicks. Wordpress can you hear me now-the facilitator of your videos moves way too fast for anyone to walk step by step with the video. Even slower playing speed on my phone is not a solution it makes no sense that way. Need more avenues for points of contacts to assist with newbies. I know there isn’t enough time in the day so start a program similar to Windows Learning. Appointment scheduling options to video chat and 1/2 hour increments are genius and then after that the person can opt into scheduling for more time with the same happiness engineer who has already acclimated with the clients learning habits. Or..diversify your video facilitators so the teaching styles are a mix and not so fast all the time.

Don’t build your system on WP. I did and it has been a huge mistake. Here’s another WP breakage example posted Feb/2024: I found in the WP app that I could no longer open the menus on my website; so no access to any of the website other than the Introduction page. I wrote WP, What did you guys break? Their answer we didn’t do anything to your site. That person directed me to convert my theme to their Twenty-Twenty theme to test plugins. Well that was a bad idea. The 20-20 theme no way resembles my site or any site that I know of. I lost my home page, the Introduction. Fortunately I found it. It was lost to the draft pages tho it is a finished/publish product. Good thing I looked there.. Three more “happiness engineers” chimed in with not one of them taking ownership. I have never heard back from any of their “happiness engineers”. Fortunately I found the problem by examine the activity log and found 2 plugins update (by WP) when I lost my site access in the App. And I was able to test the plugins right there in my theme. In other words, WP did break the viewer and their support is near useless. Over the years I would say all of my site problems have been caused by WP. Way back: I’m on WP for about 4 years now. It takes a lot of work to build a system and well into that process I discovered WP lost my footnotes in many pages. Of course they can’t fix what they break because WP.com is a “managed” environment which means someone is screwing with your site and you don’t know it. I’ve had them break fonts which again I have to hunt thru my system to fix everything. The help desk is good to help you build your desired design but after that your screwed. Again (now May 2021) I just discover my pages, some many months old, are missing embedded images. I’ve contacted their help desk 3 times. - no answer. I’ll have to go thru my whole system to find what broke. I’m proofing another page at the time of this writing and now it has cross linked footnotes from other pages. The last WP iOS app lost its Add button to add posts and pages! The ability to contact the help desk thru that interface is also missing. Bottom line WP is extremely proprietary and you cannot export your content to another platform at all from WP.com. If you are serious about your website consider very carefully whether you want to do business with WP. It’s a huge risk.

Make sure my domain auto renews. I have paid Wordpress to pay me back. LeeLee dot info needs to pay for itself. I understand it usually does, but the nag bothers me. Otherwise Wordpress is amazing. Aside from that, however, I am fine. Just make sure it does renew. Like I said I love Wordpress laying me back.