Got suckered into helping a non-profit with their web presence, and of course, it was a Wordpress site (at least it wasn’t a Facebook page).
Everything about WP is mildly infuriating at best, just regular infuriating at worst. Everything. If you know, you know. It’s like they tried so hard to make it “easy” to use that it went full circle into a fuster-cluck of unintuitive and clunky everything.
With every facet of the experience being an upsell, is there a tier where it’s just not horrible to use?
Specific examples:
- WYSIWYG editor doesn’t match the preview
- Chasing the scroll point in the outline when moving elements
- Can’t edit block properties after they’re added
- Everything is a damn upsell
- Want to remove the Wordpress footer? Upgrade to a paid plan (does not specify tier)
- Okay, I’ve updated to a paid plan that meets our needs. Please remove the footer please.
- “Oh, you have to have a plan two tiers up to do that”
- General clunkyness
- Only supports Apple map embeds which cannot find any of the addresses I need to enter
- Cannot embed a Google map properly (doesn’t support percentage widths for the iframe element so I can’t make it responsive)
- Changing the column widths on a layout grid block never releases the slider, so you have to mash keys until something else selects that locks it roughly where you want it.
I think a lot of that is a lack of knowledge around it’s capabilities, it’s not as flexible as other systems, but at the same time it’s absolutely amazing at doing certain things really fast and easily. I have thousands of people using systems I’ve built in SharePoint and more than half of them don’t even know it’s SharePoint. They just pop in, use it, and get out.
In all fairness, it may be. In the cases that have been dropped on my plate, it was absolutely not the correct tool for the job. It was just “what we have”.
It’s frequently the best tool for the job BECAUSE they already have it. If you need another tool, with another login, with more licensing costs, and more training time, and more support, it’s often a worse option even if it has more features.
If they’re trying to spin up an intranet and share some files within the organization, it’s absolutely amazing. If they want a simple database containing active work items for a small team to process, it can do that too. If they want a central place to see who’s currently on vacation… SharePoint’s got you covered.
If you’re trying to use it as a ERP system, it ain’t going to work. If they want a full fledged CRM, also a bad idea.
SharePoint can meet at least 80% of the requirements for most office business processes involving files, pages, or single database tables, and it can do it for 20% of the cost/effort of dedicated software. If you want all the bells and whistles, that ain’t going to cut it though.