Got hired on retainer for a startup to help with their website & develop a mobile application. Their current ‘Developer’ is not actually a developer, but something closer to a ‘Website Builder’ who specializes in the Avada theme & WP Bakery page builder. She is unable to code, or do much anything without her chosen theme & page builder.
I spent 4 hours on the phone with her troubleshooting a maintenence splash page she used a plugin to create. The client noticed social media link previews didn’t work after he started a social media campaign sharing the link to the upcoming website.
Long story short:
* Plugin didnt put correct metadata; apart from modifying the plugin, the other solution is to just make the page instead of using a plugin for it.
* She did not want to make the page for some reason, said we should message the plugin dev & ask him to add YOAST support, or ability to add meta tags via plugin options.
* I pointed out why that wasn’t likely to happen for free, or within any reasonable amount of time. Page was very basic, would take me less than 3 hours to code it from scratch. With a page builder it should be faster than that, right?
* She reluctantly agrees after I offer to do it myself. Asks me for help the next day with a half finished page; Contact form doesnt work, nothing is responsive, margins & padding are all over the place at different sizes.
* I work with her on the phone to provide custom CSS classes to override page builder styles, as she is unable to figure out how to change some things. Tell her I’ll finish it overnight as it’s been hours at this point.
* Get frustrated with responsive; too many different style sheets conflicting with eachother from plugins. Audit the site to find issue; Am horrified to find **56 plugins, 3 different page builders, and 2 ‘mega addon & plugin bundle packs’**.
* Decide it’s easier to do from scratch than work around all of this. Instead of just recreating the page I rebuilt **THE ENTIRE WEBSITE** for the client in \~6 hours using my own theme & codebase.
* All problems are now fixed. Page size has also literally improved by almost 100 times.
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My question is, how can I work effectively with this ‘developer’ short of taking over building the entire site myself?
I have offered the following options to assist her:
* Offer: Build custom gutenburg blocks for use in the default WP editor
* Problem: She doesnt know gutenburg or much vanilla WordPress. Only Avada & WP Bakery Page Builder
* Offer: Make custom CSS classes to place on elements through her page builder
* Problem: She doesn’t understand CSS enough to know where to place classes.
* Problem: The page builder code is messy, tons of containers with their own margin/padding to position things. This means multiple classes must be placed to do one thing. Not efficient
* Offer: Make custom theme for client, build in back end tools for her to update content + add new sections.
* Problem: It’s not Avada or WP Bakery. She would have to rely on me for changing CSS, and learn how to work with vanilla wordpress.
* Offer: I take the lead on development, use my tools/setup, and **TEACH HER** how to do the non code portions of the work. I’d be doing this off the clock on my end to keep to budget, while she would be ***GETTING PAID TO LEARN*** industry standard practices / tools / plugins. I’ll even teach her code if she wants.
* Problem: I’m getting the feeling she is unwilling to learn things out of her comfort zone. She’s been ‘developing’ websites for 10 years longer than I have, and is also older than I am. I don’t want to seem like the younger dev telling her how to do her job… but it’s not the correct way to do this particular job, as it requires a lot of custom work (which she doesn’t seem able accomplish with her plugins/theme).
Are there other ways I could work effectively with her that I’m missing out on?
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What exactly does this person contribute?
I was asked to step in and help complete a site in a very similar situation before, and I discovered the best way to get it finished was to start over.
If you would tell me the same scenario, but with Elementor, Divi, Brizzy or Oxygen builder instead of WP Bakery, I would recommend to adapt to the designer and work with such page builder as the base.
But it’s WP fukin Bakery Builder. It’s one of the most archaic, ugly page builders, and using it feels like traveling back to 2012.
So, my suggestion is to bring your GTMetrix scores to the client and explain them about why your approach is better. Work better and more efficient with your tools. And either make her adapt or get fired.
>>> Problem: She doesn’t understand CSS enough to know where to place classes.
>> Problem: It’s not Avada or WP Bakery.
Fuck me, this person is not a professional.
This is like the equivalent of a plumber who knows how only to use a wrench and a screwdriver and is completely *unwilling* to learn anything else… working with an engineer.
No professional in *any* field, let alone a rapidly-moving field, should let their skills be this out-of-date. Her skills were barely adequate ten years ago. At the moment she’s worse than a dinosaur.
It’s 2023. Avada and wpbakery are dinosaur products. And any “developer” who doesn’t know css basics – or worse *doesn’t want to learn them* is a giant valuesuck for any serious web agency.
I think that because you are a professional, you should let the company know what’s happening here. Even if it means that they don’t know how to process the information and end up firing you.
I honestly think your professionalism is on the line here.
Also – you’ve been really patient, but you might be giving far too much of youself:
You went from needing to fix a button to rebuilding an entire site.
That’s many thousands of dollars worth of work.
I’m guilty of doing this shit myself as well, but I hope you got paid for that.
And even more important – I really fucking hope that the agency you are working for saw the value in what you did!
Super sleepy right now so not reading all of this but does advanced custom fields integrate with her tools?