Quill Ink

There should be a support group for people who use WordPress.

Not a forum. Not a help page written by some snot-nose third grader named “PluginGuru77” who assumes you were born knowing what a query loop is. I mean an actual support group. Folding chairs. Bad coffee. Cheap cookie crumbs from snacks that were once whole. ‘Hi, my name is technologically inept Jane, and apparently I am mentally challenged.’ A safe place to say, “I tried to move one block and somehow erased my entire navigation menu. I have a trunk full of eggs and toilet paper. Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, get your power washers out.”

Because that is WordPress in a nutshell.

It is the digital equivalent of trying to make your shoelaces the same length after pulling one side too tight. You tug the left lace to fix it. Now the right one is too long. So you pull the right. Suddenly, the left disappears into the shoe like it has given up on life. You loosen both. Now they are somehow worse than when you started, and you are bent over in a rage, wondering how something this simple became a personal attack.

That is WordPress.

You do one innocent little thing. Move a title. Adjust some spacing. Try to make a picture sit next to text like two civilized adults. And without warning, the entire page turns into a narrow vertical hostage situation, every word stacked like a ransom note.

I did not ask for this.

I did not invite this chaos into my life.

I clicked one setting. One. And now my homepage looks like it was designed during a power outage.

What makes WordPress especially maddening is how confident it is while ruining everything. It never says, “This may completely wreck your layout.” No. It lets you stroll straight into disaster with the casual energy of a person holding the door open while your house burns down behind you.

And the language. Dear God, the language.

Template.
Pattern.
Block.
Group.
Stack.
Row.
Query Loop.
Synced pattern.
Unsynced pattern.
Template part.

At some point, it stops sounding like website design and starts sounding like instructions for assembling a Scandinavian bunk bed with directions written in Sanskrit and a missing screw.

Every time I think I am getting somewhere, WordPress finds a new way to humble me.

I fix the header. The footer vanishes.
I restore the menu. Every button links to the same page.
I finally get the image size right, and now the title is vertical.
I remove one weird block, and the whole site shifts like a Jenga tower built on rubble.

It is never one problem. It is an ecosystem of problems.

WordPress does not believe in closure. It believes in layers. Every fix reveals three more issues lurking underneath, like a home renovation show where they open a wall and find termites, mold, and the ghosts of poor design choices past.

And yet, because apparently I enjoy suffering, I kept going.

It has been a week now. Seven full days.

I kept clicking.
I kept dragging.
I kept muttering things under my breath that would make a pimp blush.
I kept saving, previewing, reopening, and questioning every decision that led me to this moment.

Because somewhere under the nonsense, under the disappearing menus and mystery spacing and blocks that refuse to die, there should be a site I actually want. Clean. Sharp. Functional. A homepage that does not look like it lost a bar fight.

But no.

The entire site looks like Stevie Wonder and Snoop Dogg put it together.

That is the sick joke of WordPress: every once in a while, after two hours of nonsense and one near-breakdown, it still does not work.

It should not be this hard. I have lost a piece of myself battling through this process. And there she sits. Uneven. Unbalanced. Laughing at me. Mocking me.

There is a special place in hell for the creators of WordPress. They lied. It is neither easy nor user-friendly. I could have built this thing blindfolded and gotten the same results.

This is worse than shoelaces.

And I do not even like wearing shoes.