2006

Posted: December 21st, 2005 | Author: Michael R. Murphy | Filed under: Food for Thought | No Comments »

Everybody is making predictions for trends in 2006. Of particular interest to me of course are the predictions involving hot technologies,design trends,etc. While I’ve read recent posts by Andy Budd and Cameron Molla,I’d like to draw your attention to a comment about those posts made by Roger Johansson at 456 berea street and a response to that by Chris Heilmann. Chris is known for writing great articles over at A List Apart and his own personal site http://www.icant.co.uk/.

Chris thinks there is too much concentration on the new hot thing,ruby,ajax,etc and not enough focus on what those technologies can do,ie: using technology for its own sake rather than to accomplish something. I agree. The focus should be on the end result rather than pieces in the middle. Does a client really care if you’re using bleeding edge X if the end product meets their needs? From a project management and ongoing maintenance standpoint,they should probably understand the technology but realistically,end users most likely won’t,so what does it matter?

He also mentions he’d like to see more focus cleaning up the functions of CMS to better use and write cleaner CSS. This was of particular interest to me because of my recent research of the Sitecore CMS.

I think CMS is a great tool for businesses. We had this discussion many many many many times in my old position when it came to visibility on the web and search engine results. We just didn’t have it because we didn’t have fresh content on a regular basis. It shouldn’t be a web developers job to generate content for a web site about skin care or financial products and you wouldn’t expect an aesthetician or banker to be writing their own HTML and publishing content. CMS is a happy medium. The web developer sets it up and gets some templates in place for the general site layout and then writes some CSS rules to enforce branding guidelines. If you’ve chosen the right CMS,for the content authors,it’s as easy as using MS Word to publish. Do you think I’d write here as often as I do if I had to start a new HTML page from scratch? And upload it? And go into my old pages and create links to the new material? Fat chance.

A lot of the mundane details of my current position could be alleviated if we used a CMS. thankfully it’s a small portion but does anybody really want to pay an experienced developer to copy and paste from a Word document into HTML when the document’s author can write it directly in the CMS? Probably not. This would be a huge help in freeing me up to do more productive things.

So,for 2006,let’s concentrate on solving problems not technologies.

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