Shahar Solomianik

One of the nicest things that a publisher gains by using WordPress (and any other open CMS like Joomla, Drupal and the likes) is the elimination of what was once – and still is for those publishers who still don’t use open CMS – a tedious, exhausting and frustrating process – the process of designing your website.

Designing a website wouldn’t have been such a dramatic process if a human designer wasn’t involved. But that’s not usually the case. If you polled a group of publishers for the thing they dislike mostly about what they do, they would definitely vote for the process of communicating with a website designer to be number one.

The problem is usually that publishers and designers hold completely different approaches and while formally speaking the same language, be it English, French or Slovenian, they use different dialects. Moreover, while publishers look for the utility in the design, the designer will most likely look for the artistic aspect.

Publishers who ever found themselves trying to explain their designers about usability and utility will testify that always when they finally had the designer humming, there was a slight feeling of guilt hanging the air, saying something like “hey you publisher, you art killer.” At that point many publishers share a very shameful thought. They wish they could hand the design process to a computer… experienced to a certain extent with computers, having those as well not always functioning as expected, publishers appreciate the predefined communication methods of computers – also known as protocol.

Now getting back to WordPress, and what it has to do with all this. Well, WordPress covers so many aspects of CMSing, one of them is a set of rules for designing themes and templates. Any publisher who chooses to publish their websites with WordPress must obey those rules. And – any designer who wishes to design a WordPress website must also obey those rules. There you go. No more conflicts. No more guilty feelings. The publisher can be so much utility driven, and designer can go so far with their artistic aspirations.

I am not sure they meant it over at WordPress, but what they really did is creating a communication protocol for publishers and designers.