gdgt's Acquisition Forces Us to Up Our Game

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February 14, 2013

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This is a rallying cry for us, WordPress!

Yesterday’s news that AOL is acquiring tech recommendation site gdgt.com didn’t make much of a blip on my radar, until I read these quotes from gdgt co-founder Ryan Block:

We’ve always considered ourselves a design and engineering company first. So part of what I’m going to be doing is…expanding the scope of what we’re working on … We’re going to apply the same sensibilities around creating a great holistic product experience to other sites around the [AOL tech] portfolio.

The bar has been raised in general around design, engineering, site experience, features — all these things.

We’ve come to expect a very high standard of interactivity. And the reality is there’s a lot of work to be done with some of these sites, and that’s what we’re going to do.

This quote may seem innocuous at first – Block is simply acknowledging a trend in the online media space – but it gets more interesting when you consider that TechCrunch, another AOL tech media property, is a high-profile WordPress VIP client.

TechCrunch also happens to be one of the most cluttered, traditionally-designed media properties, particularly compared the The Verge (which the interviewer in the Block article quoted above specifically mentions).

In that light, it appears that Block’s quote is aimed directly (if not exclusively) at TechCrunch, and his quote suggests that TechCrunch may be shifted away from WordPress VIP towards an in-house product developed and/or overseen by Block and his team, similar to how Vox Media (corporate parent of The Verge) uses its own in-house CMS called Chorus.

So what’s the big deal? WordPress is handily winning the publishing platform battle worldwide; even in the enterprise world, WordPress VIP continues to expand its services and includes high-profile media clients such as Time magazine and CBS New York.

That success means this isn’t a “sky is falling” warning; rather I’m suggesting that old, tired, and unfair “WordPress is for traditionally-formatted blogs” trope may still be a factor when online media properties choose their technology platforms.

If that misconception is a factor when enterprises choose platforms, it can be particularly troubling as media companies (such as AOL, Vox, and Buzzfeed before them) choose and promote in-house platforms.

An in-house platform is more likely to stick around and much harder to untangle from as it requires more staff (people that you don’t want to lay off) and includes more legacy code than any open CMS.

If it’s true – that WordPress is passed over, at least in part, because of the outdated and incorrect notion that it’s too generic and not customizable enough for enterprise – what can we do as developers?

The answer is simple to realize, and harder to implement: We should push our clients, and ourselves, to expand the boundaries of what our sites can be in terms of design, layout, and functionality.

We know from working with WordPress on a daily basis that there’s no reason it can’t outperform custom-built solutions when it comes to providing features and design. We just need to tell that story with more forward-thinking implementations.

Some great examples of this type of forward-thinking:

PandoDaily: Previously a fairly traditionally-designed tech news blog, its recent redesign is bold, unique, and modern. Whether or not you like some of the design choices, I think most people will agree it’s less cluttered and more visually interesting than most technology-focused properties.
Quartz: Launched by The Atlantic, Quartz is a beautifully-unique mobile-first imprint that is clearly designed for the scanning mentality encouraged by the form factor of phones and tablets.

The trend towards in-house technology platforms within online media space doesn’t foretell the end of WordPress as the most beautiful and useable publishing platform on earth. But by understanding the new devices, habits, and tastes of our readers, we can create new and better experiences for users that uphold the promise of WordPress as we know it.

What do you think – Does WordPress have a reputation as outdated within the tech media community? What other design and/or feature trends should we be recognizing and building towards? Share your thoughts in the comments.

There are 4 comments

February 14, 2013 #

Edward Caissie

I’ve always maintained “It’s WordPress … anything is possible!” and use that as one of my site’s tagline. I agree with …

That success means this isn’t a “sky is falling” warning; rather I’m suggesting that old, tired, and unfair “WordPress is for traditionally-formatted blogs” trope may still be a factor when online media properties choose their technology platforms.

… and I also see this as a bell weather we should be watching to see what these “custom in-house CMS” applications are doing; and then using these “examples” as (obvious) sources for WordPress installation design and functionality ideas.
February 15, 2013 #

Christina Warren

While TechCrunch — an AOL acquisition — is based on WordPress, as far as I know it’s the only site in the AOL Tech family that uses it.

When AOL acquired Weblogs Inc. — the company that created Engadget, Joystiq, TUAW, Autoblog and many other big name blogs — back in 2005, it didn’t just acquire the network, it also (and perhaps, most presciently) acquired the CMS tool Blogsmith that Brian Alvey built specifically for the sites.

Blogsmith still powers every AOL Tech site except for TechCrunch (again, an acquisition that happened many years after the Weblogs Inc purchase) and even three years ago, it was still lightyears ahead of where WordPress is today, at least when it comes to a CMS built for a bustling, busy newsroom that posts upwards of 40 or more stories a day.

When Block and Rojas were at Engadget — before founding Gdgt — they were using Blogsmith.

More to the point — the trend towards in-house or non-WordPress solutions isn’t a trend; it’s an industry fact that has only continued to happen with the latest wave of new media companies.

When you look at REAL media companies, and by that I don’t mean a blog that gets a million or two million hits a month — I mean media organizations such as The New York Times, Time Inc, Conde Nast, CBS, Hearst, Meredith, Tribune Company, Dow Jones/Newscorp, etc. that have large staffs, exist on multiple platforms and often have revenues that are tens or hundreds of millions of dollars a year, almost all of them have NEVER used WordPress and frankly, never would.

Yes, it’s true that WordPress (and MovableType for that matter — don’t forget HuffPo still runs on MovableType) ushered in an era of blogs that used WordPress and some of those blogs have become the new media companies of the future (In full disclosure, my longtime employer is one of those companies), but even then, the trend has been to go to custom or more robust publishing solutions for all but a very few.

With the exception of the blogs on CNN.com — which should NOT be confused with CNN itself — and parts of the Washington Post — again, PARTS, the base site is not and likely never will be based on WordPress — most media companies do NOT use WordPress.

That’s not a slight at WordPress but if you’ve ever worked in a newsroom, you’re immediately aware that it isn’t always capable of performing up to task. In fact, while Drupal powers a good number of magazine sites, the general trend of the last 3 years has been away from PHP in genera and towards Ruby and Python. Remember, Django was designed for the Lawrence Journal. As a result, Django and other Python frameworks have gained popularity in those circles.

In the last 18 months, we’ve seen a stronger move towards Ruby on Rails. The Verge, Mashable (my company), Talking Points Memo and many other sites are now using Ruby as a server backend.

Please don’t take this comment as a slight on WordPress — it’s not — and I’d certainly bet money that I’ve written more words in WordPress than 99.99% of its users (we’re talking MILLIONS of words) — but you’re reading far too much into the interview if you think that Ryan and Peter’s big changes will be about a CMS, especially when they don’t even use WordPress on most AOL sites (and certainly not on the biggest tech site, which is not TechCrunch, but Engadget).

Disclosure: I worked at Weblogs Inc (which is now basically what is known at AOL Tech) from 2007 – 2009, I know Block and Rojas socially and a friend of mine works on the AOL Tech engineering team. I’m currently a senior editor at Mashable, which still uses WordPress for our publishing interface, but has been completely decoupled from WordPress on the frontend (and indeed, the server backend) since our redesign in Dec. 2012.
February 15, 2013 #

Ryan Block

Well, as I said on Twitter, I have absolutely nothing against WordPress — we use it at gdgt, I consider Matt a Pal, and we even share(d) investors. I use it to power my own personal site. I like WordPress. But that doesn’t mean I’ll use it for every single project every single time — I’m all about the right tool for the job.

I find this post to be really pretty defensive! No one’s gunning for your CMS! At least not where I work.
- February 16, 2013 #
  
  Jason
  
  Hi Ryan-
  
  Thank you for taking the time to comment. Frankly I disagree – I don’t think my post is defensive in the least; rather I simply quote your own words, draw a fairly obvious inference, and then talk about *positive* steps that the WordPress community can take to counter-act negative associations.
  
  I appreciate your reassurances that you like WordPress, but liking it and taking it seriously as a viable enterprise platform are two quite different things. As a strong believer in the platform and community, I’m happy to be out there as a positive advocate for the strengths and opportunity of WordPress.

How do you stay on top of your WordPress game?