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01.22.08
Get Your Developers On A Platform
 By
Rich Brooks
This past Friday we shut down flyte for an all-day planning session with the entire staff.
It wasn't nearly as painful as it sounds, in big part because we've got a great crew here that likes and respects one other. I truly believe that dartboard with my face on it was an aberration...Jonathan and Andy tell me that outside the U.S. it's considered a sign of respect...like burning the flag. But I digress....
We spent most of the day reviewing our process and identifying weak spots in documentation, hand-offs, and communication breakdowns, coming up with ideas on how to improve these areas.
We also spent a good deal of time talking about the type of Web sites we'll be building this year. Without giving too much away, I really feel that the future of Web development is platforms. One of the things that I find most frustrating about our work is that it often feels like we're reinventing the wheel with each job. Although the structure of many Web sites is similar--navigation on top or left, banner at top, two or three columns, call-to-action down below--it always feels like it's the first time we're building a site.
Platforms are software applications that take a lot of the grunt work out of building a site. Examples include Joomla, WordPress, Drupal and a thousand other content management systems (CMS). And although those are all open source platforms, there are of course hundreds if not thousands of companies rolling their own CMS to meet their or their clients' needs.
Platforms can reduce a lot of a developers time on a project, allowing him or her to concentrate on other areas of Web development, including usability, conversion and Web marketing, for example. Because most platforms are in fact CMSs, they allow clients to update their own content without any HTML knowledge. Of course, this brings it's own potential problems.
Once a platform is learned, however, it can make the upkeep of a Web site easy for anyone comfortable with a computer.
Platforms do have their drawbacks. One issue is that you often have to give up a little bit of control over layout when using these platforms. The very flexibility that reduces development time and allows anyone to update the site can hamper pixel-perfect layout. Now, that may not be an issue to many people, but other organizations may have a hard time with that.
One thing we've seen over the years are clients who plan on updating the Web site themselves, so request a CMS, then find out that they don't have the time or inclination to do so. Instead, they end up forwarding updates to us--which is fine--but since we're fluent in XHTML/CSS, updating the site through the CMS takes us longer, costing the client more money. Picture Lance Armstrong on a bike w/training wheels and you'll understand why.
Another issue is that since platforms are built to support a wide variety of different business types, there can be a middle-of-the road generalness, a vagueness of design. I've seen plenty of sites that reek of the platform they're built upon. They're just a step above those ubiquitous FrontPage Web sites that caused conniptions among Web designers everywhere in the late nineties and early oughts.
However, if you pair a talented designer with a robust platform, you have the opportunity of building a Web site that can help grow a business or organization. A platform can't replace the need for proper planning and execution, but it can free up some of the drudgery of development. That gives a talented Web development team the time and flexibility to help a business leverage the Web to generate more online leads, convert those leads into customers, and improve the bottom line.
The future looks bright....
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About the Author:
Rich Brooks is president of flyte new media, a Web site design and Internet marketing company in Portland, Maine. Flyte works with small businesses to build professional Web sites that often include e-commerce, Flash and content management systems. They promote their clients' sites through search engine optimization, e-mail marketing, business blogs and podcasts, and viral marketing.
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