After many hours, a lot of screaming, much frustration, and some ice cream, I’ve finally found a decent solution for putting Tumblr posts on the blog sidebar. It’s not what I would have wanted, ultimately (I’d prefer you see more text, but I couldn’t get that to happen without large images and videos messing up the sidebar), and I’ll keep looking for better solutions. The main takeaway for me here is that Tumblr plugins for WordPress are extremely poorly written. Just dumping the javascript output from Tumblr is not good enough, people.

The other takeaway is quite possibly that my theme sucks. Any little thing that wants to be wider than the sidebar gets its way, despite my protestations. I did not design this whole theme myself — I just heavily modified an existing one. I might consider switching, but I really love the look of this theme and want to keep it.

I’m wavering between dusting off my web design skills and just whacking this theme into shape, finding something similar but better coded, or just calling Stephanie Leary and offering to pay her to do it right from the ground up.

My boss just passed along the link to the commercial below for Intuit Websites, a company that aims to help small businesses build websites right! Watch the short commercial and see if you can spot what’s wrong with Intuit’s approach:

Can’t see it yet? Then I’ll tell you: services that give the impression that it’s a good idea to build a business website using templates^[1] are lying to you. That’s right, lying. Universal template-based websites are rarely a good idea for anyone, and certainly not businesses.

You run the risk of your website looking just like a ton of other people’s but with slightly different colors or a different picture in the corner. Plus, I’ve rarely come across a template service like that which results in good-looking websites. They claim they’ll make the site building process easier, but easy too often means so simple that you might as well use MS Frontpage for all the good it will do you.

Not all small businesses have the money to hire fancy web design firms and it’s true that the president’s nephew probably isn’t the best way to go. But do not make the mistake of thinking that those are your only two options. There are tons of independent and freelance designers who will not charge you as much as a firm yet will still do a good job. If you’re really, really in a budget crunch, a college student studying design will do you better than a template site.

So please, whenever you see a commercial such as the one above: run away. Run away screaming. Because sites like that may seam easy and a good deal but it is all a horrible lie.

Notes

1. This is different from websites that use WordPress templates. Though you do want to make sure your WP doesn’t look like everyone else’s, you can still use a template made by someone else and tweak. The kind of templates I’m talking about are generally for non-dynamic sites. And sites shouldn’t be non-dynamic, anyway. [↩]