You’ve heard the sayings. “The best offense is a good defense.” “defense wins championships” “Deeeefence, Deeeefence, Deeeefence.” They apply to almost any sport and it’s usually good advice. But it doesn’t really apply very well to conversations about web development.
Has this happened to you? Recently I was at a dinner and happened to be seated next to a woman who was a web producer at an ad agency. We started a conversation about development and she asked the inevitable question, “What platform do you use?” I knew exactly what was coming when I said “WordPress. And you?”
“We built such and such a site on some platform, we felt that because of it’s complicated nature we needed something more powerful”
I instantly got defensive, mumbling something about WordPress having come a long way and you’d be amazed and such generic twaddle, looking to quickly change the subject befor I turned argumentative. You know what they say. Don’t talk religion, politics, or content management systems.
Now had I been a mature adult… Wait, I am a mature adult, in years anyway.
I could have taken an entirely different tack. I could have asked her to tell me about their platform. WordPress doesn’t need defending and I missed out on what could have been an interesting conversation. I could have learned something, maybe the platform (I honestly can’t remember what it was) is something I should look into learning. Maybe I would have made a good contact, because I listened and asked questions. See where I’m going with this?
The funny thing is though, for the purpose of this article, I looked at the site in question to try to figure out what it was built in. WordPress.
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