Don’t Just Develop–Steward
As developers, our responsibilities extend beyond implementing new features, fixing bugs, or making quick updates. We must steward the projects we work on by ensuring their maintainability and improving their overall quality over time.
Recently, a colleague reached out to me asking if I would manage their WordPress website for their business. They relied on support from their hosting provider but became increasingly frustrated with their slow responses and subpar quality. Having heard about my experience in web development, they were eager to explore other options.
What should have been a one to two-hour task evolved into a ten-hour ordeal. This situation could have been avoided with proper documentation or if older pages were transitioned to the newest plugin.
Good documentation, thoughtful system architecture, and proactive problem-solving are essential to leaving a project in better shape than we found it.
Poor Stewardship has a Cost
Their first request was straightforward: create a new page, add a few links throughout the website, and update the navigation menu to include the new page.
When they asked if I felt comfortable making these changes, I confidently agreed. After all, I built WordPress sites from scratch before—this was a simple task.
However, once I gained access to the website, I quickly realized that what I initially estimated to be a simple update turned into a complex and time-consuming challenge.
Every attempt to create a new page resulted in the infamous WordPress "white screen of death." Editing existing pages proved equally frustrating—some pages would load without displaying any content, while others displayed content that could not be modified.
As I delved deeper into troubleshooting these issues, I discovered that the website had five different plugins installed for content management. The absence of clear documentation on which pages used which plugins compounded the problem.
Good stewardship through documenting the plugins and updating the pages would have saved me and my colleague time and money. For business owners and developers, good stewardship saves resources and allows those resources to be invested elsewhere.