[ale] Creating a website (semi-rant)

[Rich Faulkner]

Good questions and will answer them as follows:


On Tue, 2011-12-13 at 09:11 -0500, David Tomaschik wrote:


> 
> Rich,
> 
> Saying "hand code" is great and all (and I've done it) but it doesn't
> work for anything larger than a few pages, and there's more than one
> reason why.
> 
> First, say you've hand coded a site with 50 pages and a Vice President
> comes to you and says "we want a little blue bar with information
> about product X at the top of every page."  How do you add this to
> every page?  How do you remove it from every page when the CEO decides
> it was a terrible idea?


Server-side includes are a great way to add drop-in content that touch
every page.  This was our solution to just this problem.  Insert a code
widget that calls a common page and populate the widget with the page.
We use this for site navigation, headers, footers anything that calls
for one common piece to be used globally.  This beings at planning and
design phase for scalability and move accordingly.


> 
> Secondly, how do non-techies edit content?  At the university where I
> work, we literally have dozens if not >100 people who produce content
> for the web.  Most of them are business managers, administrative
> assistants, faculty members, or student assistants.  We have one
> webmaster and about 1.5 FTE supporting our CMS.


I comment code in such a way that new content is pretty easily inserted.
Even a non-techie will be come a techie (that is the point of this) so
that they can be comfortable with the tools and how to interact with the
platform.  Again, I have trained more than one noob how to do this!


> 
> Thirdly, people take shortcuts.  When they hand code, they're gonna
> get it looking right... on one browser on one platform.  When we
> develop themes for our CMS, we test across upwards of a dozen
> browser/platform combinations, including both iOS and Android, Mac
> (Chrome/Firefox/Safari), Linux (Chrome/Firefox), and Windows
> (Chrome/Firefox/IE).


Cross browser has been an issue from day one.  Best way to learn it?
Hand-code.  Learn the quirks and how to design for it from the
beginning.  Use several browsers as test if not OSes in VMs.


> 
> Now, I'm not advocating WYSIWYG editors ala Dreamweaver, but I also
> think that hand coding is not a solution for even the small business
> level.  Content Management Systems let you structure content, manage
> access to content, update content, and keep content with a consistent
> look and feel.
> 


When I was a manager at Cox Radio Interactive we used Notepad for the
most part (in the early days) and managed all the sites in this manner.
Local webmasters were offered tools that we custom built so that they
could update content...but it was still simple text based solutions.
Our enterprise at that time was 68 portal level radio station websites
and got done in three months start to finish, fully customized and on a
skeleton staff.  

I've heard all of these arguements before and YES it can become too
daunting on a VERY large scale site, but for most smaller sites it works
just fine...RinL
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