Too strong? With WordPress, you can try to use custom fields or innovative hacks like Bill Erickson’s approach to multiple content areas using H4 elements in his excellent theme “Thesis”. Unfortunately, neither of those approaches really deals with the depth of the design problem that often requires multiple content areas for pages.

As an information architect/user experience designer, I’ve been involved in many projects that required more types of content on any single screen than WordPress is designed to handle.

Let me draw out what I’m talking about here.

Exhibit A: Page content that WordPress is designed to handle

In a standard WordPress page or post, you’ll see these author-controlled pieces of content.

• Post/page Title
• Body
• Excerpt (often not-used)

Standard WordPress content fields include the title, excerpt, and body.

There are other sets of data for a page or post that an author can control, too, but these are meta-data such as tags, categories, slug (shows up in the URL), and possibly search engine optimization information like title, description, and keywords.

For a normal blog, many online trade journals, and a lot of basic websites, this really covers the bases. The body contains the bulk of the content including images, video, and audio that can be intermingled with the text itself. This model is very flexible, and it has definitely proven itself.

Exhibit B: Page content that pushes WordPress too far

In 2009, there was a small project at work to develop the website Covenant Musicians, and because the person who would keep the site updated was already using WordPress, we made the decision to build this site with WordPress too.

Well, if you look at one of the destination pages for this site, the musician profile page (here’s one for example), you’ll notice some different pieces of content which may or may not be present on any particular musician profile page. When they are present, they need to be in certain places and sometimes with certain content.

This custom WordPress page uses fields in addition to the standard options: Musician Image, URL, and Video.

The problem is, to control those extra pieces of content: the video, the band image, the link to the band’s website, the site owner needs to use WordPress’s custom fields in very precise ways, without the benefit of WordPress’s content editing tools. What a drag!

To make life easier for the site owner, we ended up recording screencast instructions on how to use these fields and delivered those help files with the site itself. (We used Jing by Techsmith, by the way.)

It would’ve been better had the interface been clear enough so that we didn’t feel the need to document the process of updating these destination pages, but that’s the trouble with stretching WordPress beyond its default content fields.

Ask too much of WordPress and ease-of-use is the casualty

Do you see the difference? When an effective design solution requires multiple types of content per page, using WordPress will actually make your website difficult to manage. WordPress is usually so easy to use that when you hit this wall, it is very apparent.

When you’re at that point, WordPress is probably not the right CMS to choose.

Should WordPress improve in this area?

Whether through the core application or through an excellent plug-in (is there one already that I missed?), if WordPress is going to grow in the content management systems field, this shortfall will need to be addressed.

However, WordPress is really excellent at what it does already, and the better course might be to decide to keep the features in check and let other systems compete in the mid-to-enterprise scale CMS arena. Scope creep never stops, and a good application strategy knows when to say “no.”

Am I wrong?

Am I off-base here? This is just one aspect of WordPress that should limit its use. Another that should cause designers to think twice is when dealing with faceted-navigation which requires more than one dimension (tags can probably handle one dimension). But, again, those are more complex design requirements.

I’m not a WordPress consultant, and I’ll bet some of you would like to point to the errors in my thinking. Let’s hear it.

Over the next week the existing files at davingranroth.com/blog will go away and be redirected to blog.davingranroth.com, which is the WordPress-based site.

If you find broken links or missing files, please let me know so I can fix them. I should have taken care of the bulk of them already, though.

This means that you will need to have a TypeKey profile in order to comment here. Sorry for the hassle! It is pretty easy to get a free TypeKey profile, so just do it

This will also mean that when you do comment, your comment will be published immediately, instead of waiting for me to get around to manually clearing it.

The issue is related to the css float property.

I’ll see what I can do over the next couple days.

I also ditched the monthly archive link list and the calendar. Instead, there is now a longer list of recent entries, and I posted in some articles I wrote for my business site–mostly just to get some visibility on them.

Davin likes to remind me that there is such a thing as a BLACK WEB, which, I guess, means that there are zillions (that is a technical term) of sites and pages out there that search engines, bots and people simply cannot find or access due to bad code or intentional obscurity.

I love that concept. I’m a conspiracy theorist at heart.

The thought of hidden stuff is exhilarating; even though I know most of it is probably like the site I had to build for my English 453 class in college. BAD! Either way, Ranting will not stop the flow or stem the tide and movable type works for dingbats like me (and apparently, Noel). SO, MOOOHAHAHAHAHAHAH, you angry ranter. I shake my fist at you with indignation.

Gotta go. Grading papers.

To comment, you’ll need to create a typekey account. You’ll only have to do this once, and probably you won’t actually have to sign in that often.

Warning: To those who enter false email addresses to avoid spam-bots, you’ll need to enter a URL when you comment as that will override the email display.

If you don’t enter a URL, your actual email address will show. So, put in a web address. This could be your company’s home page, or, if you have nothing to link to, link to your favorite search engine or something.

Hopefully Six Apart, the company that provides Movable Type, is on this problem and we’ll see this fixed promptly.

Until then, continue to comment away, but you won’t see your comments right away. It’ll be until Chey or I can manually approve them.

I found it sort of funny. I pictured myself sneaking upstairs at midnight, my wife sleeping soundly in bed. How peaceful.

Then, I would put my hand gently on her shoulder, give it a little squeeze and say, “Wake up honey, I’m redesigning the blog. Do you like these colors?” As I hold up her laptop, the light from the display shining on her incredulous, very tired face.

Hm. Somehow, that just doesn’t seem like a good idea.

So, anyway, what do you think of these colors? Hate them? Love them? Couldn’t care less about the colors, you’re just here to read and see pictures? Feel free to extrapolate.

Eventually the fading photo thing will be working on each photo section. In time.