Web agencies should do more than just hand over a set of templates | Hacker News Reader

Web agencies should do more than just hand over a set of templates

torchbox.com

7 pointstomd13 comments

I cannot stand authors that do this: "OK, OK, the CMS is not dead, I’m just being provocative." Instant trust lost.

Classic example of Betteridge's law of headlines[1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_law_of_headlines

For the fellows currently downrating this comment, the title was Are content management systems dead?, and has just been edited to Web agencies should do more than just hand over a set of templates a few minutes ago.

I've been pondering this for awhile now, as one of my clients makes 99%-static websites for their marketing campaigns. They currently use Drupal as their CMS, but I see that as overkill, as most of the site is static and the layout shouldn't be changed by anyone with publishing rights. However, you wouldn't believe how hard it is to break through the "$CMS can do it all, easier, faster, and cheaper" thinking that has been sold to executives.

In my client's case, the only "content" that changes are blog posts, media (screens/videos) and, possible, promos on the front page. Everything else stays the same, 24/7/365. There is little reason spend money on using a CMS that can do everything, when a simple HTML/CSS/JS and a clean web framework (Django/Rails/Symfony) will do.

What I've attempted to explain to higher-ups is that website development should be built on progressive enhancement, because it is easy to start with something bare and add the features (models, callouts to external services) fairly easily and with little code. The flip side is that if you start with a kitchen-sink approach (a la Drupal/Joomla) you will need to take away features because the administrators will have too much power to change the site, increasing risk that something bad will happen.

Thing is, most companies, especially those with small budgets, don't give a shit about crazy UX, they just want a fairly attractive site that they can manage the pages and copy on. Then there are bigger companies with huge, expansive libraries of content who really do need a system to manage it all.

I think the author is mistaking Content Management Systems with something else. Content Management is about content management. I don't quite get his point.

I’m concerned that enabling a writer/journalist/marketing executive to control every aspect of their website Well, IMO you can't refer to "controlling every aspect" by "content management". If you don't want people to modify the design, use a CMS.

The only part of the Google Ventures homepage that needs to be content managed is the Here’s what we’ve been up to section. Exactly ! Content Management is for people to manage content.

his point is that for static content, the workflow should be [someone generates content] -> [layout person designs a layout optimised for that content]. with a cms, what you get is [someone designs a generic layout] -> [content person stuffs content into it]. fine for, e.g., a "latest news" blog, not so much for page-shaped stuff.

Here's something I realised a little while ago:

The web is my content management system.

I post to Flickr, Dribbble, Blogger, Github, Google+, Twitter etc and that stuff is my content. I post it there so that other people will find it and interact with it.

After that realisation, I figured why fight it and decided that the strategy for my personal site was to collect all my content from those other places.

Excatly! And that works nicely in corporate environments too.

But don't you wish you had a tool to keep track of what you've posted where, streamline broadcast-posting, and manage conversations?

That's a market I'm surprised not to see twitter-client-makers invade - social management systems. They've been making ones for Twitter, why not also a Github client? And a Quora client? Have conversations with the same people across a variety of services and sites? Let a social management system coordinate the conversation.

Imagine conversation view looking like:

  Back-and-forth emails on top, followed by 
  A few tweets with images linked, then a 
  Github pull request, 
  2 FB messages (with other FB friends too), 
  Another pull request,
  A Facetime chat, and finally
  Some closing emails.

It reminds me of Wave.

Hah, try working at an agency, Building that landing page and having all the parts editable by non-techy users is absolutely required & no real challenge, It just takes a "homepage content item" type system with specific fields for things like "hero image copy" or "content area 1 image/copy/icon"

In my experience, the "it just takes" path of development will lead to a user experience that breaks down fairly quickly in many content management systems.

The overall layout of a page becomes hidden behind layers of indirection in the CMS (e.g. you edit the hero here, and then go there to select it for the homepage, but the content for blocks on the next row of the homepage are maintained somewhere else entirely).

As an agency, it's not that strange to offer 'marketing services' which includes doing the content and layout for key pages of the client's website (like author's example of the iPhone 5 section on apple.com). It can be more cost effective to have a front-end developer update these pages if and when they change, compared to developing a complex CMS to handle constantly evolving page layouts.

All good points, CMS ux can get fiddly, front end editing can help, but that's a rabbit hole i'm not keen on,

I think I've managed to keep things reasonably straightforward (e.g. for these oddball pages all the fields are on a single page in the admin, with a nicely segmented form), but as ever there is a lot of room for improvement, and I do concede a time for doing things by hand occasionally :)

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