It is fun to make sense of a poorly written tutorial with bad code. Last night I found an old tutorial with a nice idea but some mistakes with the code. I decided to write a better version of that tutorial. Fixing it was like a puzzle, and I enjoyed it. Now we will be publishing a more accurate and up to date version of that tutorial on WPBeginner, which will actually help more people.
Many WordPress businesses usually have a blog where they occasionally publish tutorials. These tutorials are mostly submitted by guest bloggers, who are also either running a small WordPress business of their own, or promoting themselves as freelancers. I feel that WordPress businesses should have blogs more focused on their products and information related to it. This would make those blogs more interesting. Correct me if I am wrong, but I think that using blogs to bring traffic and using them as link bait is a thing of past now.
But who am I to judge any one, if this strategy works for their business, then I guess there is nothing wrong with it. However, this strategy sometimes affects the users. Who come to these blogs, thinking that it’s a nice brand, they must have written something great about the problem I am facing. They land on a guest post which is not actually written by the company behind the website. They follow the tutorial, which may or may not work. The tutorial may have poorly written code snippets which these unsuspecting users add to their sites. The guest blogger may not have done that on purpose, but they are very less likely to revisit that post and update their code.
Another problem that I have noticed is that sometimes these tutorials can get very out-dated. At WPBeginner we regularly try to update our old articles. But I have not seen much effort in this regard on other websites. I think it is wonderful that they can attract guest bloggers to write such lengthy tutorials. But they should also pay someone to keep these tutorials up to date. It should be an actual job where a person or team actually keeps tutorials up to date.
