WordPress Makes It Easy To Publish Poorly Written Posts

In case you missed it, Jeff Chandler published a post this morning titled “WordPress Visual Page and Website Builders Make It Easy To Create Ugly Sites“. In my opinion, saying that a WordPress page builder makes it easy to create ugly sites is like saying that WordPress itself makes it easy to publish poorly written posts.

Jeff’s argument is 100% valid. If you don’t have the design chops, using a page builder isn’t going to make creating good looking pages any easier for you. The same can be said of WordPress. If you don’t know how to write well, WordPress isn’t going to make publishing well-written posts any easier for you.

My issue with his post is that it paints page builders in a negative light and that seems to be a common occurrence with some of the top bloggers these days. Maybe they feel that way because the market is over-saturated and there is a lot of junk available, or maybe they just feel like page builders are a fad. I’m not sure.

There are plenty of real world applications for page builders that make them extremely useful. Sure, using one isn’t for every situation, but I can tell you from experience, there have been many times in the past when having the functionality they provide would have made things much easier for me and my clients.

Tools are tools, and page builders are just another tool that augments WordPress in ways that help those building on it.

What are your thoughts on page builders? Do you think they are evil incarnate that will bring us back to the days of ugly MySpace pages or are they a useful addition to an already powerful platform?