For those with a knowledge of such things, I very nearly called this Project Arcturus, the one Hank Scorpio was running in the Simpson’s episode You Only Move Twice.
But I decided to name it after my very first website which no longer exists, which I built when I was an MA European Studies student and named after the Acquis Communautaire, because creating understanding is what it was all about.
What happened was that while I was looking for a new job (yes, I’m still available as I write) I came across a few that were related to website management. Well, I used to do that! Obviously, things have moved on a bit in the last 20 years and, despite keeping vaguely up to speed with developments I know I’m still a bit short in certain areas.
Using Google’s PageSpeed site I can see that my site passes tests for SEO, Best Practice and Accessibility. Performance is slow, but I know why and I’ll fix it… eventually.
Then I ran my site through PowerMapper and… well. Less success there.
Complianz, the plugin I was using to provide a cookie banner, threw in a slew of unwanted code and CSS. I only needed Complianz for the comment form and, and you might notice, there is no longer a comment form (because no-one leaves a comment these days, that’s so 2010s). Having no comment form also stops accessibility errors because of the colour scheme.
And since no-one – as far as I can tell – ever did a social media share of my content, I got rid of that plugin as well. Which also fixed some accessibility errors.
WordPress culpa
There are some other issues to fix. The header graphic at the top of the page is too large, which slows down display time, and which requires a code change. I need to make links more accessible by improving the colour contrast, and including underlining or outlining in places.
But that’s because I cobbled the template and CSS files together from scraps found elsewhere. Same with some of the custom code. It’s bound to be a bit iffy.
But then I set up a fresh install of WordPress 6.9.4, using the Twenty Twenty-Four default template. And guess what? It fails. A lot.
On PageSpeed it fails SEO (84%), while the PowerMapper site find an overall score of 39% of issues across the board, including usability, accessibility and standards. And that’s with an out-of-the-box template.
Do-It-Yourself
And this is the problem with open source packages such as WordPress. Yes, they’re quick to set up and use, but there’s no quality control. That there’s no quality control on a default template ought to be a cause for concern; if you fail WCAG Level A, you need to find a new career1.
Now: I will be the first to admit that using a CMS brings certain advantages, such as the way it handles metadata, tags, categories; and the way they use templating systems to build pages on the fly so that you don’t have to remember to copy and paste in bits of standard code.
But as I look under the hood of a WordPress-generated page or post, I think… could this not be done better?
That’s what Project Acquis is about. Can I rebuild this website so that it looks almost the same, but doesn’t use WordPress?
Time, as always, will tell. Join me on the journey, if you’ve nothing else planned.
- Admittedly, at first glance it seems that PowerMapper is wrong but you’d have thought the template was run through a checking tool first.[↩]