benbecula

I have yet to get anything to work as I wish, so I qualify as a newbie. (For background, my first computer was an IBM 704, MIT, 1960ish, so I’m not *that* much of a newbie.)

You are too eager. I don’t want to think about Akismet yet. I don’t want to think about Jetpack yet. I don’t know know or care what a tinymce editor is. I don’t know or care what QR is. I don’t want to know about the beta. I don’t want a ‘First Steps’ with 157 choices. Remember the Macintosh ‘Quick Start’ approach of the 1980s? Worked beautifully. 3 pages and the compute was up and running–or walking, but one could thereafter experiment.

Your concept of a ‘5-minute installation’ breaks down at the 2nd step, when it sends me off to deal with creating a MySQL database. No idea how to do that! Fortunately, Powweb did it for me, after I gave up on MAMP and trying for a testbed blog on my MacBook Pro.

But working with another ISP is a mixed bag, with everybody saying, ‘Ask the other guy about that. We can’t help you.’

You throw 23 files at me, 2 of them called index.xxx. What I need to know, *right now*, is which of those is related to what I want to see on my blog page, and how what I do with it affects what I see. I don’t need to know about adjusting php yet–not until I can see a blog page that is working, so that I know which parts are under my control, and figure out how to control them. Apparently wp-admin is important, but it takes a lot of fumbling to see why.

‘Pages’ is interesting, and does many unexpected things–none of them what I was looking for, and no doubt they will be really useful next month. But it’s all sort of Microsoftish–and as it happens, I have a perfectly good HTML page that I’d like to use in your system. There’s probably a way to connect these. I can display it–but none of the blogstuff stays around. Call it a post that I want comments on: do I really have to retype it?

That’s a rhetorical question. My point is that your user interface was designed by people who already knew everything about how the system worked. What you need to do is what made Apple successful: watch what a naive user does wrong, *and keep fixing the GUI until no naive user does the wrong thing*. Good luck!