This week we have a guest columnist — KJR’s own web developer, Kimberly Lewis:

This is a follow up to last week’s column, to explain my biggest issue in web dev — one businesses that want successful web projects should be aware of:

Spend more, not less, on software.

Yep, I’m talking about everyone’s least favorite add-on cost. And I’m going to say something other open-source devs (I am one) will probably dislike.

Free isn’t always better

In fact, IS Survivor was a great test case of exactly why you want to pay extra for certain things. I paid for an inexpensive WordPress theme. (For those unacquainted with WordPress, themes are what control the look and functionality of your site, and they come at various price points.) I started with free themes. Six different ones, to be exact. The problem with free is that you get amateurish design, and worse functionality and configurability.

While I can deal with not-so-great design, I can’t put up with bad functionality and overly limited configurability. While I could consider going in and writing custom code within the theme by making what’s called a “Child Theme,” that would add weeks of concentrated work onto the job, and therefore a serious added cost.

Long term, a premium theme would be a better option. Now it’s just a matter of determining price point.

I like some of the more expensive themes. Why? Out of the box they have a great layout, lots of added functionality and customization, and plenty of extra support for when things don’t go according to plan. In my opinion, it’s worth it to prevent some extra costs.

Here is where I drag my father on his own website like the cheeky little brat of a daughter I don’t mind being. My dad is nothing if not cheap. He really, really didn’t want a premium theme. We compromised on an inexpensive but not free theme that fit the previous site’s look and feel, had the customization I wanted, but, due to the low cost, lacked a lot of the extra functionality I would have had with a higher end theme.

We’ve been paying for the decision ever since.

The limited functionality, combined with my father’s preference for displaying the entire post in full on the home page, resulted in immediate problems displaying archive and search results. My choices: either plugins, or adding a half-dozen additional pages of code into the theme. (Once again, for non-WordPress developers, a plugin is a software add-on I can install for added functionality without coding.)

This led to me trying 25 (yes, this is accurate. I kept track) different plugins for the archive list. I got refunds for 10, and all but one was incapable of handling the sheer number of columns in the archive. I’ll give Dad credit: He’s a persistent and voluminous writer.

In this case, free was the only choice — literally the only one that wasn’t breaking. Unfortunately, it’s ugly. Sorry. Not much I can do about that.

Search was the bigger problem. We started with a free trial for the best search engine on the market: Algolia Search. It’s good. It’s really good. It’s also horrifically expensive, but I’d hoped we could get away with the free version.

For the same reasons as the archive plugin, we can’t. And paying for it on a smaller site like IS Survivor is like taking out a mosquito with a thermonuclear bomb (although I’m originally from Minnesota, so I understand the temptation): too much power, too much cost for a site this small.

So now we have a dilemma. Do I go ahead and find a free search plugin, or do I use a paid plugin?

The pros of a paid plugin are, once again, customization, support, clean integration, and no ads. Yes, often you get ads on something if you don’t pay for it.

The cons of the free ones are lack of clean integration (Google Search WP, I’m looking at you), less customization, no support except from other users, many of whom have hacked the living daylights out of the plugin, and often compromised functionality.

This is a matter of cost vs. worth, and it goes all the way back to the decision to purchase an inexpensive theme.

If we’d gone with a premium theme that out of the box had everything we needed, but was also much more expensive, we’d have ended up spending exactly the same as we’re paying now. This is what businesses have to think about. Sometimes free or inexpensive will do the job. That’s great. But in case it doesn’t, be prepared to pay more than you were planning on to fix the problems “excessive frugality” can cause.

If you’re curious: I bought a single use license for a search engine plugin. Hope you like the result.

Robert Fulghum described a scene involving his younger self, when his summer job was working at a resort. The pay was limited, but the position did include meals.

Which turned out to be franks and beans. For every meal. Meal after meal after meal, until he reached his breaking point and threw his plate across the room in a fit of pique.

Which was when a co-worker — a holocaust survivor — suggested, “Fulghum, you need to learn the difference between a problem and an inconvenience.”

Most of us do. As Randall Munroe — the creative genius behind XKCD, of whom I’m insanely jealous for so many reasons – once pointed out, “Our brains have just one scale, and we resize our experiences to fit.”

I don’t know about you, but I live in a world of constant irritation, and that was before the election. I need scaling strategies. One recalls my days as an apprentice evolutionary biologist.

So when the folks who run the building our condo is in have to shut off the water for a few hours, or my computer takes longer to boot than I’d like (anything longer than instantly is longer than I’d like), or a call from “Anonymous” interrupts my train of thought (okay, usually it’s my caboose of thought, but it’s the best I can manage even without interruptions) …

Faced with these outrages, I imagine myself explaining why this raises my blood pressure to dangerous levels to Ogg, my hunting companion who lives in the cave next door, but won’t be my neighbor much longer because on our last hunt he suffered a scratch that became gangrenous. Only we really don’t know anything about gangrene. Our diagnosis: “Arm turn green, hurt, and stink!”

Or when I’m stuck in a center seat, our flight is delayed because of the line at the de-icing station, and I just finished the last novel I really want to read on my Kindle and will now be forced to read a book that’s more a professional obligation than something I’m actually interested in …

I imagine complaining about this to my fellow clan members when it’s time to move on to the next hunting and gathering ground because we used this one up. Which means we each tie up everything worth carrying into a bundle we haul on our backs and trudge behind our elder, hoping he knows the right direction.

In my imagined migration, my fellow clan members are something less than sympathetic to my center seat plight.

It isn’t that we all live in a Panglossian wonderland, or should. This evening my wife and I will be attending the funeral of an acquaintance who suffered a massive heart attack. He leaves behind a wife and teen-age children. That he exceeded what was humanity’s average lifespan for most of our evolutionary history isn’t even remotely comforting to his family.

Although, evolution aside, knowing my dad made it to 90, passing away painlessly after living an amazing life, does put quite a cushion on my grief. While I miss him (and on three occasions while writing this wished I could consult him on a matter of word choice), I know I had a lot more of his time than many my age, and I had him lucid until the end besides.

“Old age ain’t for sissies,” Bette Davis once said, and while I refuse to admit “old age” applies to me just yet, I could only continue to claim middle-agedness by joining the post-factual revolution.

Accompanying my steadily increasing codgerliness is a boatload of galling indignities. My self-diagnosis: I suffer from MARD, which, in case you haven’t heard of it (as I just coined it you probably haven’t), stands for Minor Age-Related Disorders.

The specifics are none of your business, but collectively they annoy the daylights out of me. Okay, yes, chronic crabbiness is a MARD symptom, but it’s just a symptom. The root causes are the other MARD symptoms.

Recursion is, I guess, more than a data-design strategy. It’s a way of life all its own.

Most readers of this weekly missive make their living toiling in the fields of information technology. While bending digital devices to our will does provide some unique satisfactions, there’s no question our trade is accompanied by no shortage of crankiness-inducing situations. But only if we let them.

So I’ll leave you with something my wife and I have started to say, to each other and to friends whenever complaining about something that doesn’t pass the evolution test starts to dominate a conversation:

If this is the biggest problem we have, we have a great life.

* * *

Well, that about wraps it up for 2016. Enjoy the holidays. We’ll resume our weekly chats in January.