[bsder]

> And yet, reality is that for many companies, an off-the-shelf CMS is all they need

Except they don't. A static website would work for 99.9% of all businesses and could be hosted on a potato.

The problem is that marketing wants a website that "Doesn't look embarassing and has 5 nines uptime."

Translation: "Marketing wants a website that looks completely like our competitors(because reasons)! But make it completely different (because reasons)! And make sure it's on AWS (because reasons)!"

Response from IT: "Our website results in zero revenue to the company and is a gigantic security problem and spam magnet. And because marketing is involved it's also a headache of a political football. Here's the WP Engine credentials. Now fuck off."

[gjsman-1000]

> Response from IT

This is where the mistake was made. Tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of small businesses do not have an IT department.

Even the business I work in - almost a dozen employees before a single IT guy.

WordPress and Squarespace, and software like them, are the off-the-shelf solutions for them. You sign up for GoDaddy or another shared hosting provider, what do you get? Right now though, Squarespace is eating WordPress’ lunch, and (if you don’t need plugins) is objectively superior in many ways.

We need a modern replacement for WordPress to fulfill that role which won’t make programmers swear, or let closed-source solutions shut out the open ones.

[bigiain]

> The problem is that marketing wants a website that

... they can publish and update content without having to get IT involved - just like they did at their last job where the website was WordPress.

Oh, and IT who thinks their company has a marketing department that adds zero revenue to the bottom line needs to go back to they mom's basement or academia. That's just not how the world works.

[bsder]

> Oh, and IT who thinks their company has a marketing department that adds zero revenue

Please reread. I said the website brought zero revenue.

The website for our company never broke 5 digits in total views. I could almost precisely correlate who was looking at our website with who marketing was currently talking to. Scaling was useless. Dynamism was useless. etc.

All resource spent on the website was worse than useless as it took marketing away from doing anything else which would could result in revenue.

A lot of businesses are in the same boat where the website brings in zero revenue. A static website would be more than good enough but somebody in mangement chain has a "Must Keep Up With The Joneses" streak. And then you wind up on WordPress.

[bongodongobob]

No they can't. You don't roll out technical solutions without IT involvement for obvious security and stability reasons from hosting, bandwidth charges, auth, security maintenance, cert renewals, https, etc, unless you don't care about any of those things. That's literally ITs job and why the dept exists.

[bigiain]

Those concerns are kinda the raison d'être for WPEngine.

For anywhere small enough to not have an IT department, or so large and where the IT department has effectively become obstructionist to other department's jobs, just buy marketing their own WPEngine subscription and let them do their thing.

I think people who work in an "IT Department" sometimes have a too narrow view of the rest of the world. Both ignoring that almost all small and most medium sized businesses do not have an IT department, and also that there are people and departments in their own organisations who's IT needs are real but are not considered a priority by the IT Department.

(Often understandably not the IT departments priority, the people in a bank IT department who're securing financial systems from continuous attacks almost certainly don't consider the HR departments need to set up a quick website for the company bbq or RUOK day to be a prioroty. But someone in HR is getting _super_ frustrated at not being able to do the "simple things" they know they could do if IT didn't keep pushing back.)

[bongodongobob]

I'll just ignore the "IT pushback comments", as if we don't have real actual reasons for pushing back against the stupid shit people with no experience think is a good idea.

The main problem, security aside, is when shit goes south (and it will at some point), IT will be asked to handle something they didn't set up, don't know anything about, and will be looked down upon when they can't get it working quickly.

As long as there is ownership of any problems by whomever set it up, yeah, go nuts, but experience also tells me that's never how it works.

[gg82]

And then people bypass IT for things that IT would be happy to help them with and end up getting called in to fix some non-standard thing that has become critical to their work.

[bongodongobob]

Hahaha, I've been in this exact situation. Marketing set up an entire WordPress website unbeknownst to IT. Over a year's worth of effort and they never even mentioned to us they work working on it.

I'm in a monthly directors meeting of all depts and marketing unveils their wonderful website to much applause and oohs and ahhs. They then say, looking at me, "Yes we should be ready to launch in a couple weeks after IT sets up authentication and integrates it with our CRM and mail blast system."

I was so lost for words I just kind of nodded my head, wide-eyed.

The way they had it set up did not allow us to use the same SSO/auth we used for everything else. So users would need a separate account. Their auth system didn't support any kind of MFA. Their plugins were not compatible with our CRM. External accounts would need to be set up manually. They used a different domain thinking they could just change it later but it got so baked into everything that changing it everywhere would be extremely difficult. Their hosting solution was going to cost us a shit ton of money because none of the graphics were optimized for web. Every image was like a 50MB PNG. It did look nice, but nothing was set up in a way that made it compatible with anything we already had in place.

I told marketing there was no way I could make this work and they'd wasted a year's worth of effort by not pulling me in from the get go to at least help them find some sane compatible solutions. "Well, if we can't use SSO, couldn't we just build a spreadsheet with everyone's logins so you could plug that in?" Jfc no.

The CEO/owner sends me a meeting invite and asks me why I'm refusing to work with marketing on their website. I explain that they had decided not mention any of this to me from the get go and explained the reasons why I couldn't make it work.

I said, "well, technically we could make anything work, but you're going to have to hire a small dev team to integrate this with our CRM. We're going to have to pay a lot more monthly for our CRM because now we need API access (we'd need that either way even if the plugins were compatible) and if you want a team to write some custom integrations for this, you'll need some kind of retainer to make sure they can support it when the plugins change and break everything in unpredictable intervals or the plugins are no longer maintained."

He refused to believe me and basically said "Well I'm not sure why I'm paying you if you can't even get a website to work."

I quiet quit and resigned about a month later. You can imagine the other kind of shenanigans that went on if that was considered acceptable.

[johng]

This really doesn't sound believable, on your part. You can't run pngquant on the images directory to shrink down the images? Should take 2 seconds of shell script. Honestly a lot of things you mention seem like pretty trivial to do... Wordpress is so well understood and there are so many utilities and integrations for it, it's one of the simplest things to integrate with something else. This comment sounds like you were mad they made something that the rest of the company wanted and got mad and didn't want to play ball.... could just be misinterpretation over text, who knows.

[bongodongobob]

* yes the images would be an easy fix

* their CRM plugins did not support Salesforce

* even if it did, they didn't realize that was like an extra $1500/month for API connection (something like that), which was also balked at, but just a plain fact

* they already built everything out and changing plugins was not an option

* I have almost no experience with WordPress and 0 time to figure it out alongside the myriad of other projects on my plate

* 0 thought went into authentication and that was also something I couldn't change

* this was not built by a team with WordPress experience, or any technical experience

They said "it's set up like this, make it work". I couldn't, not without dropping everything and hiring someone to do it, and managing a contractor(s) which was also not an option.

[gnu8]

> He refused to believe me and basically said "Well I'm not sure why I'm paying you if you can't even get a website to work."

I would quit the moment I was spoken to in that way, if not sooner.