For months, I have been hard at work hard day in and out to complete LeadPress, our next generation lead generation website / mortgage publishing platform. LeadPress offers unparalleled content creation, control, and SEO opportunities by leveraging WordPress and the large community of developers at large that are constantly building out the platform and plugin capabilites. With the LeadPress release imminent in the coming weeks, we were looking into delaying our release until WP 2.5 is released on March 10th. If you are not familiar with WP, Wordpress is the preeminent blogging platform used by countless online blogs and websites including Lenderama.
Curious about what the new dashboard looks like, I came across a demo. You can view a demo here with login: admin / password: demo. Caveat: this is an alpha release the final release may be worlds away from where this version is at. While there are reportedly new features including full RSS feeds that do not cut off where you have a “more” tag, dashboard widgets, and other added functionalities, I’m addressing the dashboard specifically.
At first I liked the new colors and more 2.0 ish feel until I looked at the write page. The page has been stripped of most of its functionality by removing all the right column objects such as categories, discussion, password, post slug, post timestamp, etc. These are now moved to the bottom of the page, where you have to scroll down to get to them, making the new design not only less efficient, but a pain in the a$$ as well. As I played around with the dashboard, I realized that overall, it is far from being as intuitive as the current dashboard. The overall light hues and soft tones give the dashboard an indecisive feel and there are no strong borders or object delineation to emphasize the various components. In short, the new dashboard is not only aesthetically less desirable, but more importantly, it loses significant ground in user functionality and efficiency.
That being said, the final release may not be anything like what we are seeing thus far. More importantly, I think the WordPress crew are arguably some of the smartest and most talented people out there (to me they’re nothing short of rock stars) and that being the case, I have to give them the benefit of the doubt that I’m simply looking at a premature version of 2.5.
If for some reason 2.5 ends up not being much different than the current alpha, this may or may not create user outcry depending on whether or not there is funcitonality enabled to let users defer to the “Classic” WordPress theme. If there is, there is no issue. If there is not, then this may be WordPress’s version of “new coke“, the reason being that WordPress has raised the bar so high, has done such an outstanding job thus far, that we (I) are spoiled and have come to expect much better execution than what 2.5 alpha is showing……. I’m all for change so let’s hope this is a premature assessment and I am wrong!
Author: Trace Richardson offers No Closing Cost Mortgage Refinancing Rates and No Closing Cost Home Loans at TraceCapital.com.
Mortgage Industry Professionals. Like what you see?
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