Incomplete, poorly documented, questionable support

  • I was fooled by the hype on the website, and the review by Chris Lema.

    Make is a novel idea to start, it uses a basic theme, and a plug-in (for the Make Plus edition). The claim is that it clean code and doesn’t deal with all the nasty overhead of the clunky visual builders. It also sells itself a small business friendly theme. Nice idea, in concept…

    Unfortunately that’s where it stops.
    You need to do all of you customization through the CSS panel, and the basic options that are available are really not that relevant. For example the “white label” feature is simply a checkbox that shows/hides the text, not actually an option to replace the text with something more pertinent. As a result you need to create you own code, and then find yourself with two lines in your footer, one that’s left aligned for the code that you wrote, and one that’s right aligned for the social icons.

    Even things liked padding, margins, etc… need to be manually coded in, which, in this day and age should be easily controlled through the customizer (a native device of WordPress), and without having to rely on clunky GUIs.

    The support has also been less than great. Direct questions have not been directly answered (“Do you have documentation that shows me what classes affect what parts of the layout? Ideally in a visual form.”), and have resulted in just pointing to WordPress information, and mentioning that it’s 100% compliant.

    To me, this ultimately comes down to misrepresentation and a basic misunderstanding of their customer base. They claim that it’s a small business friendly theme, but I don’t know many small businesses that have an excess of time to figure out how to customize the website. Sure, for web development shops it might be interesting, but for most SMBs they are so slammed for time that when presented between Make vs. Barebones WordPress vs. Squarespace (or the likes) the answer does not land in the favor of Make.

    I’m more than happy to revise my 1 star if I’m given a good reason to do so.

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