> Takeaway: “More WordPress. If you want to lose an election…” –Paul “This is the most important pattern we’ve found. All of the losers are on WordPress.”—Rich
That was really interesting, If I was to vote on based on their webpage qualities, I think Hillary would get my vote there.
Cleanness and text oriented navigation was nice. donation page flow was great. SSL all the way and direct to the point on links. great job.
I really liked Trump's header though. Color choice and font was great, but the page load and mixed http and https between links was confusing to me. Whole page except navigation contains only "Make America great again" nothing else (made me smile).
What this article didn't mention: Donald Trump's website is designed by Parscale (www.parscale.com). They don't list that site in their design portfolio.
“You know what Bernie should have done? He should have hired a high priced, high powered, capitalist web agency, they would have probably killed it for him.”
People are offended by this remark (Sanders Fans??) but it's just a joke. Funny too! It speaks to his ideals and the irony... if he had chosen to go this route. They also make fun of themselves with phrases like "high priced".
Now... some of the comments about other candidates are downright snarky a bit mean-spirited! Yeah... there's an overall bias.
Their notes with "uh, this is such a mess, should've just hired THIS company instead" with a link to their own homepage is a pretty big giveaway too. I just hope it was done in a joking tone because unironically referring to themselves in a third person is as cringe-worthy as it gets.
Don't upvote this. This is a shallow ad for their agency (which evidently doesn't do WordPress development).
This article highlights the worst of the "webmaster" mentality – ignoring the end results in favor of things like validation errors and tools used.
They trust Hillary as a politician because the source code has secret comments? Seriously? And then they trash Chris Christie for the same exact thing. And Bernie gets two thumbs down (and a shot at him for being a socialist... along with an ad for the authors) because he used WordPress? They call his site a mess but don't describe why. Bernie's site is impeccably designed and works well.
I'm sad about this article. Design and the web play a HUGE role in presidential campaigns. I happen to believe that you can tell a lot about a candidate from their website. But this was a shallow, pedantic and opportunistic waste of a potentially great topic.
"Google doesn't care, and these other sites don't care, so why should I care?"
I have found that validation serves a very important purpose - to guide your development. I have lost count of the times I have encountered CSS with all sorts of extra junk because things didn't look right, and the reason for it was that the underlying HTML was invalid.
Yes, the browsers are smart. But they are still guessing. If you leave out a tag, the browser will close it for you. Not always in the right spot. Invalid pages could also result in a DOM tree that's not quite right, so JavaScript could be affected.
Developers should validate their pages just as they lint their code, to ensure quality.
Of course, if you're using cutting-edge elements, they won't validate. But that's a little different story. It's not a reason to not validate, it's just a reason to filter out those errors.
I do not agree with your point that you have to pass validation. First of all I don't say that you should leave unclosed tags for browser to figure out. Or doing something crazy to break things.
My point is that we need to use modern tools like html5 while still being backwards compatible with older browser which means breaking some w3c rules.
Another valid case off the top of my head for breaking w3c(haven't tested if it passes validation) would be `<meta>` tags inside body tag. Which is part of the microdata format. Normally you're not supposed to put meta tags outside head but for while using mircrodata you sometimes have to rely on meta tags because your design doesn't allow for required(by microdata) to be shown on the website, so you use meta tag, which doesn't do any harm since it's not rendered for the user.
Not defending all of their content/conclusions - but the podcast was only like 20 minutes long so I think they were using validation errors as a general "proxy metric" for the care/attention-to-detail the candidates used in making their sites. You might call it "sad and pedantic" if there were other articles out there doing the same thing, but this was really the only one I've come across (and I generally pay attention) that focused on a comparative "peeking under the hood" of the respective sites. I wish they hadn't taken that jab at Bernie, too, but the podcast was interesting if for no other reason than it's the only one of its kind I've seen thus far. I agree with you that it is a super-important topic and I hope we see some deeper dives in the future.
One interesting idea they floated by in the podcast is that the general quality of the candidate's website (something technical that they themselves probably don't completely understand and have to lean on the experience of others - and know the "right others" to listen to) correlates in some way to what they would be like as president (managing things that they themselves don't completely understand and have to lean on the experience of others - and know the "right others" to listen to) which I hadn't really thought of before, but I might make a habit of reading source before I vote in the future.
I don't understand why custom solution seems to favourited by them. It's the same as saying your car is bad because it's running on the most popular fuel.
As a web developer working daily on WordPress websites I would argue that it can be as fast as anything else. Because those websites are mostly static which means caching would make it load really fast. Assuming template itself is written well. So it doesn't matter what engine you're using, it's the matter of optimization.
As for WordPress itself, the biggest problem in my oppinion is plugin compatibility. Yes you have thousands of plugins bus most of them doesn't work exactly/cannot be customized to a given requirements and you end up either modifying plugin and then maintaining them. Or just writing simplified version of it yourself. Which makes even more meaintenance overhead.
Also it's not very good for big blogs with more than 100k posts. Because of the database schema used which is both it's strength and weakness at the same time.
32 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 56.6 ms ] threadhttp://imgur.com/hc3LVwI
This one really got me.
> Takeaway: “This passes muster, I would say.” -Rich. Also, Ted Cruz may be the Zodiac Killer.
http://www.zodiac-killer.com/
Cleanness and text oriented navigation was nice. donation page flow was great. SSL all the way and direct to the point on links. great job.
I really liked Trump's header though. Color choice and font was great, but the page load and mixed http and https between links was confusing to me. Whole page except navigation contains only "Make America great again" nothing else (made me smile).
Rest of them was not interesting to me.
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-03-03/this-g...
People are offended by this remark (Sanders Fans??) but it's just a joke. Funny too! It speaks to his ideals and the irony... if he had chosen to go this route. They also make fun of themselves with phrases like "high priced".
Now... some of the comments about other candidates are downright snarky a bit mean-spirited! Yeah... there's an overall bias.
This article highlights the worst of the "webmaster" mentality – ignoring the end results in favor of things like validation errors and tools used.
They trust Hillary as a politician because the source code has secret comments? Seriously? And then they trash Chris Christie for the same exact thing. And Bernie gets two thumbs down (and a shot at him for being a socialist... along with an ad for the authors) because he used WordPress? They call his site a mess but don't describe why. Bernie's site is impeccably designed and works well.
I'm sad about this article. Design and the web play a HUGE role in presidential campaigns. I happen to believe that you can tell a lot about a candidate from their website. But this was a shallow, pedantic and opportunistic waste of a potentially great topic.
Browser tech has been moving faster than validators can keep up. Newly specced features are being polyfilled, etc.
Browsers and search crawlers deal with this; probably time for validators to be about something other than the site's static assets.
"Google doesn't care, and these other sites don't care, so why should I care?"
I have found that validation serves a very important purpose - to guide your development. I have lost count of the times I have encountered CSS with all sorts of extra junk because things didn't look right, and the reason for it was that the underlying HTML was invalid.
Yes, the browsers are smart. But they are still guessing. If you leave out a tag, the browser will close it for you. Not always in the right spot. Invalid pages could also result in a DOM tree that's not quite right, so JavaScript could be affected.
Developers should validate their pages just as they lint their code, to ensure quality.
Of course, if you're using cutting-edge elements, they won't validate. But that's a little different story. It's not a reason to not validate, it's just a reason to filter out those errors.
Some of us still have to support older IE versions which needs to some workarounds to work with it. Even the validator.w3.org doesn't pass it's own validator. https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fvalidator.w3....
My point is that we need to use modern tools like html5 while still being backwards compatible with older browser which means breaking some w3c rules.
Another valid case off the top of my head for breaking w3c(haven't tested if it passes validation) would be `<meta>` tags inside body tag. Which is part of the microdata format. Normally you're not supposed to put meta tags outside head but for while using mircrodata you sometimes have to rely on meta tags because your design doesn't allow for required(by microdata) to be shown on the website, so you use meta tag, which doesn't do any harm since it's not rendered for the user.
HTML hasn't changed in years, and XHTML is largely backwards compatible.
Had to point this out: windows are real, the broken windows effect is something from "real life".
As a web developer working daily on WordPress websites I would argue that it can be as fast as anything else. Because those websites are mostly static which means caching would make it load really fast. Assuming template itself is written well. So it doesn't matter what engine you're using, it's the matter of optimization.
As for WordPress itself, the biggest problem in my oppinion is plugin compatibility. Yes you have thousands of plugins bus most of them doesn't work exactly/cannot be customized to a given requirements and you end up either modifying plugin and then maintaining them. Or just writing simplified version of it yourself. Which makes even more meaintenance overhead.
Also it's not very good for big blogs with more than 100k posts. Because of the database schema used which is both it's strength and weakness at the same time.