I’ll try to keep this short. Back when wordpress was a sponsor, I tried it on Leo’s glowing recommendation. I was new to TWIT, and loved it, and didnt know that Leo tends to oversell everything.
Wordpress was a nightmare. When I checked with friends, they said “its a bear. why are u using wordpress?” Im no idiot, but its for ppl further up the tech food chain than me. I guess the 1st warning was when I bought it, the 1st thing they offered was “people near you who u can hire to help u with wordpress” Pretty funny. Now I know that Leo oversells a bit. I get it, he needs sponsors…and Im glad he has them. But overselling can eat into your credibility, as it has with me. Otherwise, I listen to the twit shows all the time.
beth marshall
Delta Air Lines DC-9 Capt, retired
Actor / entertainer
Small biz owner
Mom
I suppose one of the takeaways to glean from your experience is to seek multiple opinions before cracking open the wallet, and be mindful of who that opinion is coming from. Wordpress might be a good fit for Leo (and a certain target demographic), but he’s technically inclined.
Im still suffering along with the wordpress site. I got some friends to help me with it. It is so hard to use if u are not trained in the logic it uses. It is much too “open source” as some ppl told me. I needed something with a few templates, and drag and drop, so to speak. I dont want to learn how to be a professional web builder.
I know now. Just waited a little to long to blow off some steam. I was very disappointed cause Leo was so down to earth and sincere about the product. I just didnt know he was coming from, or maybe speaking to, a very different demographic, when it comes to tech.
As i said, Im not an idiot. I was an airline pilot for 25 years. but im not steeped in tech logic. I still find it rather amazing that anyone (wordpress) would sell a product where they are expecting the purchaser to have to pay someone to help them use it.
Really? You get a fully hosted, configured, integrated website building framework with point and click interface for free or 10 bucks a month and that’s a nightmare?
Honestly curious: how cheap and easy did you expect running and hosting a website including a blog to be?
I think it’s prefectly incredible to which degree we as regular consumers set up whole digital services if not service landscapes at the touch of two buttons. In many cases too easy since we technically don’t have the training to properly configure, maintain, and secure what we set up. (speaking reflecting on my own past setups) The internet is a marvel, but that it has not crashed yet due to the load of misconfigured systems is the true miracle, in my mind.
We are on different planets here. 1st, i didnt say anything about cost, that was not an issue. 2nd…I know nothing about setting up, running and hosting a website, or landscapes, and have no need for a blog. I was told by others that it was “easy”. you could either work live, or drag and drop, All i knew of tho, were wordpress and wix. After the fact, friends have told me i should have gone with wix. I have an extremely busy life, and was hoping that i wouldnt have to learn how to professionally build a website.
I think someone will jump in and correct me, but I have noticed that the advertising I hear on the podcasts and live TWIT network shows is what I find to be much more tech oriented than the advertising I hear when I’ve been in LA and listen to The Tech Guy Show on KFI.
I’m not sure that is “overselling” or just how advertising works. I find it interesting to hear a lot of the same advertisers on other podcasts, such as Science Friday presented by NPR.
I just didnt realize that Leo’s advertising on the podcasts is for a much more tech savvy audience. Im a small biz owner, so i understand advertising. Im glad the shows have advertisers. It speaks to the shows’ credibility, that companies want to spend their advertising dollars on the podcasts. And i understand that Leo wants his advertisers to sell product, so they will keep spending some ad $$ with twit. Leo is an excellent pitchman and radio/tv personality, but u just cant give a personal impassioned “this is the best thing i ever used” plea about everything. It became most pronounced when both idrive and wasabi were both advertisers at the same time. I wasnt the only one scratching my head. They cant both be the best, most reliable, most affordable backup system that u can buy.
I sell a lot of product in my biz…and when ppl ask “which is best”, i say it depends what your needs are, and go from there. One size usually doesnt fit all.
None of this is rocket science. There has just been a learning curve for me in the Twit advertising world.
I don’t want to jump in as Leo here but among the techies I do believe WordPress oversold their own capabilities as well. The part they got right is the demographic and hosted offerings. It is true WordPress is not for beginners so they offered training/setup and other services.
Often times I have had friends who were asked of the best solution for a website content management system or eCommerce platform for small business. They knew how to code, I only knew some of the business expertise and this was before I ever used my own web development skills.
Years afterwards, I ended up helping a retired gentlemen who was a business owner create his own eCommerce business out of his garage for his antique collection. Like you, not knowing what to do, I quickly learned how to use web code and integrated a shopping cart and web plugins as well as ordering/payment procedures. I knew how to register domain names and use web encryption but the site design and forms I developed from scratch because osCommerce was not quite supportable at the time.
Around the same time, I created my own website for a small project and used another content management system called Drupal. This one I found to be the easiest to use and manage. I needed design templates, polls, blogs, petitions and a way to wrap content easily enough. Not more than two weeks later did I have a working version of the website ready to go. There are so many modules and design templates that I would never need to custom code anything. The content management inside Drupal is easy enough that you can create a new page, have it linked to your homepage and add content in 5 minutes. This is what Leo also mentions and recommends at times outside of the ads. Almost all web host providers offer Drupal installs built-in to their control panels.
I also don’t want to compare anything I have not worked with but I have found as well through my social networks, Squarespace is often recommended for a simple drag and drop website catered towards certain verticals. Wix is a great starter to get your website going as well and integrated well with Go Daddy.
I also agree with your frustration because this is still common among small business owners. It’s not rocket science but developers do not work with end users and are not able to see the results or the business requirements. This is often times why many of us would hesitate to recommend a product to manage a website and I end up devoting my personal time to manage it for them because I do understand the customer, the engineer, marketing, QA and business.
I think the operative words here are "wordpress is not for beginners. Of course, the sponsor would never want anyone to advertise a product as “not” for anything. You have to say it “is” for content creators, bloggers, ppl who want the freedom of hundreds of possibilities, without having to code. Something like that. Something that says “this is not for beginners”, without using the word “not”
The irony of it all, is that wordpress dropped out as a sponsor right after I bought it.
I wish Leo & Co. all the luck in the world with getting sponsors. As a small biz owner, it was initially all trial and error to find where to advertise to get the best response, without spending an inordinate amount of money.
Honestly, web technologies are hard, and no hosting platform worth its salt is going to be completely turnkey. Many hosting services, like GoDaddy, have site builders that might prove much easier for you @beth_marshall. I’d take a look at those. They tend to produce cookie-cutter sites, but for many people that’s all they need.
Wordpress is used to create more than one-third of all the web sites in the world. I’d say that’s a strong vote for its effectiveness. But again, web tech is complicated and grokking Wordpress is not easy.
Not every advertiser on TWiT is right for every listener. I only endorse products I use and like, but that doesn’t mean they’re right for you! I appreciate your support, however!
I think if advertisers told the truth or the outlets that published said adverts did, it would be a very different world
For me personally I find Leo/Twit probably the most honest in the products they chose to advertise and the general spiel about the product. Especially for a company that relies on advertising for its income. This is not an easy line to walk. The adverts spiel can be over the top with arguably exaggerated benefits in my opinion. I chose to accept this as the value I get from Twit as a whole far far outweighs some potentially exaggerated benefits of the product being advertised.
From my experience I would say Wordpress is one of the best for beginners and advanced users. I run all my sites in Wordpress due to the ease of use. My staff also use it to update site content without issue with very little training. I do not use Wordpress for hosting as the product seems restrictive or expensive. I host my Wordpress on another hosting provider without the restrictions/expense of hosting at Wordpress. This does not mean it is right for you of course. It is best to try different products and see what suits you and your needs best.
I think the “Best for beginners” does not mean that you can just get Wordpress and now be a website designer/author/admin/coder without any learning/training. Seeing your signature and being a retired aircraft captain, if I asked you what is the best plane for beginners and you said a Cessna. I could not just buy the Cessna and be a pilot and fly without training even if it is the best for beginners. Although I am sure I would be fine if I bought the one with the built in parachute!
Idrive and Wasabi are very different products tailored to different customer sectors. Although if they were the same I’m sure they would still both be the best in their respective adverts Any product can’t be the best for everyone as we are all so different and with endless varieties of requirements.
As already said in the thread the actual content in the shows I find to be honest opinion about tech and products from Twit and guests. Not that I agree with everything of course!
@beth_marshall I also struggled with WordPress at the beginning even though I considered myself website tech savvy. Thankfully I was introduced to page builders and after exploring several, I settled on Elementor Pro. For me, page builders allow you to just drive the car rather than needing to learn how the car works.
Excellent recommendation @sawgrass. And it works with Wordpress.
One of the reasons I don’t like sitebuilder tools, I should mention, is that they often do things in such a proprietary fashion that you’re locked in. I’m a fan of vanilla open web standards for that reason.
My secret site is entirely in Markdown. There’s some javascript and, of course, lots of CSS, but that’s all eye-candy. The actual content is totally portable to any other web system. When I created my first web pages they were hand-coded HTML. Talk about hard!
Wasabi and iDrive are two very different solutions. iDrive is turnkey backup. Wasabi is enterpise cloud storage. The only thing they have in common is that they’re in the cloud.
TWiT’s shows and hence, its advertising, are aimed at tech enthusiasts. I stand by every single thing I endorse, and I never knowingly misrepresent anything, but some of the products (and, yes, topics) I spew on and on about are definitely not for the merely tech curious. I prefer to aim our content up rather than talk down. TWiT’s not for everybody. If it were I wouldn’t be working here!
Yes, there’s the explanation. Im tech curious, not a tech enthusiast. To me, a client is still a person u meet with, who is a purchaser of your goods and services.
A long long time ago, I used to build my own camera ready ad for publication, by typing out the HTML on my Imac egg, using pagemaker in OS9. It was very simple, all text.
Now i am just end product driven, and the quicker and easier I can get there, the better. As an actor, I just need to get my stuff in front of casting directors in the simplest, easiest to navigate form possible. No one ever got hired cause they had a nice website. Its pix, clips, resume. The quicker and easier, the better.
FWIW,I did get idrive for backup. Its great, so far.
I have no idea what “enterprise cloud storage” is, other than I know what each word means individually, and that the only 2 groups that i know of that call a business an “enterprise”, are the techy’s, and the Pennsylvania Board of Taxation. An of course, I still think a solution is 10% hydrogen peroxide in water,
Enterprise means big business. Wasabi is for people who store petabytes of data in the cloud. You could use it for backup, but you’d have to cobble together third-party software to make it work. As you know, iDrive includes the software. Actually iDrive uses commodity cloud storage. It’s really selling the software and the service.
If you hand-coded HTML you’re more of a geek than you’re letting on!
My secret site would be more fitting for headshots, etc. It’s pretty vanilla but very very fast. I write everything in markdown, then copy it to the server. The site software, Hugo, converts it into the HTML. It takes about 300 milliseconds to build the entire site from scratch. It’s so fast that I routinely delete the entire site every time I post, then rebuild it.
https://leo.fm - notice how quickly it loads? All static HTML with a bit of Javascript for prettiness and comments. Sites like Wordpress and this forum are massive PHP programs that generate each page on demand by merging content from a database with separate design files. The program is always running. It’s not exactly elegant but that’s what you need for some things. Like forums.
twit.tv is even more complicated. There’s a post on leo.fm describing how it works - it requires multiple servers, each doing different things. It cost us $250,000 to develop and runs close to $100,000 a year in server costs (that does not include the cost of podcast downloads). And you thought Wordpress was complicated!!!
By the way, loved you in Rockabilly Zombie Weekend
Are the test twit.tv test results from PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom, GTmetrix in line with your development and annual server costs? I would expect higher scores for such an investment.
Seems like it’s mostly up to what you want out of a website platform. I’ve used Wordpress in both hosted and self hosting methods and I honestly have never found a better platform. I tried Blogger for a while and a few others but I always end up back on Wordpress.
I find a lot of the more WYSIWYG platforms to just be way too simplistic and the end result website always looks the same as everything else using that platform.
