As with most products I use or causes I’m involved with, I’m always proud to be affiliated and promote their use whenever I can. This is no different with WordPress. Although I’ve been using WordPress for many years now, I’ve never bought anything from the WordPress shop until recently.
I’m a proud user and wanted to display that pride publicly, so I went to the shop and bought a couple of items. Overall the experience was very good, but I have a couple of suggestions, and one complaint I’d like to share in the hope that the store would be a bit of a smoother user experience. Who knows? Maybe Matt or someone else from the WP team will read this post:)
1. The store wasn’t as easy to find as I would have expected. Why isn’t it linked from the main page of the WordPress.org and WordPress.com sites? I had to Google to find it. For your convenience, it’s located at here at the address http://shop.wordpress.net/.
2. The current product choices are:
I think these selections were OK. After all, I was interested in getting a t-shirt and a mug so ultimately, my needs were filled. What surprised me was the lack of color and size selections for the t-shirts. At the time of my purchase (and the time of this writing) there were only two colors available, Red and Olive Green. I was looking for Navy Blue, but settled on Olive Green.
Even though the color selection wasn’t as varied as I would have preferred, the quality of the shirt I purchased was very nice. It was soft and thin (a good thing in the warm climate where I reside), and it fit me nice and comfortably.
Next, I went to the mug section. There I found a really nice looking “footed bistro mug”.
When this mug arrived, I was very pleased! It looks nice and it seems to be made well. Now, you should now, I am a coffee drinker. I drink two large cups every morning when at work. This is where some minor disappointment set in.
As I said, I drink a couple cups of coffee every morning, but I don’t drink them very fast, I sip from 8:00am until about 11:30am. Because of this time line, I use a coffee warmer so my coffee stays nice and hot for those 3.5 hours. This is where the trouble with the new mug starts. You see, the bottom of my current mug and my new mug are different. Check out the pictures below to see the difference:
Notice that the mug on the left has a flat bottom and the mug on the right has a bottom similar to a wine glass. Also the bottom of the mug on the right has a concave bottom.
So, what’s the point?
The point is that because of the shape of the bottom of the WordPress mug, there is very little surface area that actually touches the warmer, and the heat doesn’t transfer through the mug, and that allows my coffee to get cold. Yuck!
Unfortunately, this means that my shiny new WordPress mug isn’t user-friendly and is not functional as a coffee drinking device for me.
If there are any Automattic employees listening, could you please slip this simple request in the virtual suggestion box? “Mugs with flat bottoms please.”
