Website Themes: Big Promises-Big Problems

I’m struggling to understand why “Content Management Systems” such as WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla rely so much on themes and templates for the visual appearance of a website. I use Content Management Systems for “content management”, not web design. Who asked them to take over control of visual design ? All I want from a content management system is to handle forms, and provide website “functionality” such as blogging, storing categorized content in a database, user account management, etc. I don’t need, or want them to create the look of my website. Why does the visual appearance of my website have to depend on themes written with PHP programming? Honestly, I feel like it’s some scheme to take power away from the website’s creator, and make more jobs for PHP developers and web designers.

I recently built a web design I like using nothing but HTML and CSS, but programs like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla, to name a few, make little if any provisions, for a designer to import a web design as a simple HTML file. And why ? What else do you need to create the visual design of your website, other that HTML and CSS…have you seen what HTML 5 can do ? It even has it’s own media player now, which takes one line of HTML code to insert it into your webpage. And , it has a feature called “canvas” that will allow you to draw and paint on a website.

WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and the like, have thousands of available themes, both free and paid. Most are excellent visual designs, but not quite right for your site in some way or another. Naturally, you want to change the design somewhat, but you find that you have to know PHP. If these themes were written in HTML and CSS, these changes would be a simple matter.

The theme designers usually claim (falsely), that you’ll have complete control over the layout and colors of the theme, but in fact, the changes that you can make (without PHP) are very minimal, and insufficient. Some won’t even let you add your own logo, but instead, will only display your site’s name in a text font that matches the design of the template.

Another problem I have with these themes/templates is that not one of them I’ve ever seen, looks like it does in it’s advertising. They claim you have to add all of your content and menus first. I strongly disagree with this. My own web design has the same layout, the same sizes for the various content areas, etc., whether or not there is any content or menus.

While it is true that after you add a certain amount of content, most themes will begin to look the way they were advertised, that’s not what I want from a theme. I want to see it looks the way it’s supposed to look whether or not it has any content added.

I wouldn’t mind if the theme just appeared “empty”, with empty boxes and no text or images. I just don’t like it when the theme “collapses” with NO boxes, or have boxes drifting out of place, like a sidebar falling to the bottom of the screen when it’s supposed to be on the right (or left) side.

One theme I tried, actually listed my post’s in reverse date order and pushed my most recent posts to the bottom of the page, instead of pushing them to the top where they belong. I was stunned by this behavior because posting articles is handled by an entirely separate program. How could (or why should) the visual design part of the site interfere with  this ?

As for the theme shown in the image above, the right-side column drops to the bottom of the page.

You don’t need a full-fledged programming language to create and position some empty content boxes on a page, or create the pages color scheme. You only need a programming language to determine  what content goes in each content box, and when. For instance, you can use a programming language to change the content of any area on your website on a regular schedule, or set different schedules for each area of your website.

Using a programming language to create the visual design of your site is a waste, because the visual design isn’t going to change on a daily, or hourly, or minute-by-minute basis.

For those who may not know, HTML and CSS, the tools we use to create the visual design, are not programming languages, but “markup” languages. The difference being that markup languages cannot do things based on time, such as doing something on a schedule. Markup languages also cannot do things based on decision-making or choice, such as “if user clicks here, and it’s after 6:00PM, show this article (or picture), otherwise show a different article”. Here, the program has to make a decision (is it after 6:00PM) and then a choice (show this article or the other), based on that decision.

When you’re building a website, you don’t want to see this crap (bottom image), you want to see how the site is actually going to look, and you want to see this at all times,from beginning to end. Why can’t they just make it look like the preview image from the beginning. The very least they could have done is display fake (placeholder) menu titles and a few of the orange bullets until the actual menu is filled-in.

I think these Content Management Systems should stick to, uh… content management and leave the visual design to us.