For this assignment, I will be critiquing the very engine I am currently writing on! WordPress!
I was tasked with reading “WordPress: A Content Management System to Democratize Publishing” by Jordi Cabot and “Styling the Self Online” by Elisabetta Adami. Before this class, I was unfamiliar with anything to do with WordPress. I had taken a digital marketing class in undergrad, but it was at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, so that whole part of my life feels like a blur! We used Weebly to build our website back then, so this is a completely new experience for me.
Though I am Gen Z, I would not describe myself as technologically savvy. This has been a hard learning curve for me. Websites, technological lingo, and all things surrounding it do not make sense to me, so coming into this has been hard.
In Cabot’s piece, I was able to learn more about the history of WordPress. Cabot discussed the development that the software had gone through in the years since its release such as all the versions that had been released along with how the company has turned into a multibillion dollar business. This piece then focused on the functionality that WordPress allows and how its uses are so beneficial to their users. Cabot ends his piece by highlighting his confusion as to why there has not been more research articles about WordPress.
On the other side of the aisle, Adami’s piece begins by almost ridiculing the platform. Adami touches on the idea of semiotic theories and how the idea of how signs and symbols in WordPress is being used.
Adami breaks down the options that WordPress has such as their templates and themes and what ones are most and least popular on their site. She goes onto use an example of a blog of how it changed from 2013 to 2017 stylistically. Adami’s main critique with WordPress it seems is though this platform gives people the opportunity to express themselves in an easy way, the tools that are provided make so many similar websites. WordPress dulling the way we express ourselves through templates and pre-made styles, is what Adami concludes with.
After reading both articles, I found myself wondering how both can be true at once. I mentioned earlier, websites and design are not my strong suit. I have no background knowledge really and the whole idea of creating this website is not something I am extremely familiar or comfortable with. That being said, I appreciate the way WordPress makes it easy(ish) for someone with very little experience to somehow, somehow make a website. In that vein, I think that this platform allows websites to be easily accessible to the masses.
On the other hand, Adami has a point. Has the simplicity and accessibility of WordPress forced us to lose any creativity? The templates provided push you into a box, rather than being able to express yourself in your own way, you become bound to the template.
I think both of these can be true, however, Adami’s point almost feels like website designing should be gatekeeped. There is a beauty in being able to have a website despite not being a programmer. I think in this day and age, the more accessibility we allow to users is not a bad thing. On a personal level, if I wasn’t granted a template, I would have no idea where to begin. I think you can still be creative and expressive with a template. More and more everyday individuals need websites as a way to get their businesses or even creative entities out there to an audience, so I think being able to do this easily is not a bad thing.
References
Adami, E. (2018). Styling the self online: Semiotic technologization in weblog publishing. Social Semiotics, 28(5), 601–622. https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2018.1504713
Cabot, J. (2018). WordPress: A content management system to Democratize Publishing. IEEE Software, 35(3), 89–92. https://doi.org/10.1109/ms.2018.2141016
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