17 Feb Seriously, WordPress? ANOTHER update?
I’m trying to figure out what to do here. I use WordPress because it seems like a friendly place. It’s got a billion ways to trick out a site and make it look different from all the others. It’s more up-to-date than my HTML skills (not like HTML is the hot thing anymore, anyway). It’s free to use; no program to download or buy. It’s everywhere. It’s easy for me to teach my customers how to update their own sites. And I can make websites fairly quickly with it, which keeps my cost down for customers. I’ve found that lots of web developers use it, and that it’s a very strong tool.
But WHAT THE HECK with these updates!? Now, I understand the argument for frequent updating. It’s nice that they’re always working to make it better, as this guy said. But it’s pretty hard for me in this business to go to my customers every other week and ask them to pay for this – and even harder for me to just update everything and not ask them to pay. In the past month or so, I’ve built five sites on WordPress, all of which need updating now. An update the proper way requires me to back up the sites, make the update, and check to make sure everything translated okay. It’s a few hours’ worth of work.
I actually have somebody who helps me with things like that, and he’s not as cheap as I am. I asked him to help out with a new customer’s update to WordPress 3.0.4 last week, about when it had just came out and I ate the cost, feeling like because I had JUST built the site for that customer I couldn’t well go ask them to give me more money. I felt like I should have known there was an update coming; that it was my fault for not being on top of things. And now, a week later, here swoops WordPress 3.0.5? Oh, come ON! Little folks like me are going to go broke!
I’d love to know the answer, here. Is there some kind of magic one-click button that takes ten minutes to do this rather than two-plus hours? I’d update left and right at no charge to anyone for that! But this – I don’t know how to handle this. What’s a girl to do?
Sheesh. I guess it’s like my dad always said – What do you want for nothin’?
