I hear a lot of the Internet Marketing gurus brag about how they cannot even write their own landing pages. They argue that most (or all) of the technical stuff should be outsourced so you can spend time on marketing instead of hacking. There is no money in hacking, they proclaim. I see their point, and who am I to argue? After all, the number of "million dollar launches" that I have been involved in is exactly zero.
I do wonder sometimes how you know if outsourced technical jobs are being done correctly if you don't understand the underlying technology, but that is a subject for another blog post. This post is about code. And one thing you can say about internet marketing specifically, and the internet in general -- there is a lot of code out there. Code makes things work, and the quality of code can make or break a project (or an application).
WordPress is a great example of a situation where coding quality is absolutely critical. Apart from the core engine, there are hundreds upon hundreds of plugins that depend on the quality of the core code. Those plugins, if improperly written, can crash other plugins or even crash WordPress itself. In addition to that, there are themes which are really just code. If your theme is not written well, it can break too.
Last week, I was working with an excellent WordPress theme developer on a new theme. We were doing all of our testing on a site that was recently upgraded to WordPress 2.5, and were using some stock WordPress 2.5 template files. During our testing we found that some of the stock WordPress 2.5 theme files did not run on a WordPress 2.3 install. Now this is understandable -- after all, why would anybody expect something designed specifically for WordPress 2.3 to run in WordPress 2.5. (Note that he was doing all the work -- I was just along for the ride).
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