http://strom.com/awards/388.html
When I first began working on
my personal Web site nine years ago, the HTML coding tools were in their
infancy. (Not to mention that the whole concept of a personal site was
virtually unheard of.) I taught myself enough HTML to be dangerous, hired a
couple of kids to do the coding, and Strom.com was born. Over the years, I kept
the site updated using Notepad and some cheat sheets taken from a few books at
the time. Since then, I have resisted all attempts at making things fancier,
and have continued to use Notepad and then Microsoft Word to update the pages
on my site.
This week I launched a new
professional site as part of my day job at CMP called AutomotiveDesignLine.com.
I hope you have a chance to check it out; the site is geared towards automotive
electronics engineers and has a nice clean and lean look to it. But that isn't
why I am writing to you today.
The new site was built using
a variety of sophisticated tools including Interwoven's Team Site content
management system, Jive forums, and JavaScript. It is a beautiful thing, if I
do say so myself. Many parts of the site, thanks to CMP's IT department and a
very savvy team of Web producers, are automated so there is little need to
manually update pages. Content is catalogued in a database so that stories
entered on one of CMP's other sites can populate my site without too much fuss
and bother. That's the good news.
The bad news is to have
stories appear the way you want them you still need to know enough HTML coding
to be dangerous, and still have to use Notepad and other crude tools to do it. So much for technical sophistication.
That being said, there are several differences between Web technologies then and now, and it is interesting to see what exactly has changed when you want to launch a new site. First off, the cheat sheets have gotten better, and that is a sad testimony on the state of Web coding that you still need cheat sheets at all. Back in the day, I had books to consult when I needed to enter special characters, like Ω for the Greek symbol Omega (which is used to display an electrical unit of measurement called ohms for those of you that care). Now I can quickly go to the Internet and Google a character table within a few seconds and cut and paste the appropriate character string.
The same thing is true for constructing
HTML text tables: back then it was a laborious manual process that required a
great deal of mental energy to keep the rows and column codes straight as I
input the values. Now there are any number of Web-based tools that can help you
generate a table quickly that you can cut and paste together using Notepad.
(There's that pesky Notepad again!)
Certainly, some of this has
to do with the artifacts of Team Site, and the limitations that it has in terms
of handling content that is uploaded into its system. But I would dare say that
is true of most any content management system, which is designed to organize
content into a database rather than define how a page will look in a browser.
A second technical
difference is that the browser population has changed, but not necessarily for
the better. Back in the day, we had to worry about the many different versions
of Netscape and a few people using Internet Explorer, and even some people who
were running command-line browsers that didn't display any images whatsoever.
Testing a new site was a pain, because you had to have all these different
browser versions available on your desktop. Today's sites don't have this
particular challenge, but a somewhat different one: the browsers and sites have
to be IE-compatible, and sometimes they diverge with IE functionality in odd
ways. The trick now is knowing what IE does and making your site work the same
way in non-IE browsers.
A third technical difference
is that today's Web sites are much more than just an HTTP server sending out
pages. Back in the days of yore it was all we could do to keep our Web servers
up and running (especially if they were Windows-based). Now the site begins
with a Web server and adds database, Java servlets,
discussion forums, blog servers, ecommerce engines,
metatagging and indexing servers, and more.
This brings me to my last
point. All these technical changes have brought about a large collection of
sub-specialties of experts to help birth a site. Keeping all this technology
together isn't easy, and will require much closer coordination and more staff
than the lone guy uploading a page of HTML to his site.
To launch my automotive
site, I have been working with a large group of experts. But this means that
figuring out how to solve a problem isn't easy sometimes, although having all
this support is wonderful and makes for a terrific-looking site once it all
gets put together. Plus, if I get stuck trying to do something, it is a simple
matter of picking up the phone or walking down the hall and finding the right
person to tweak our code.
Still the tools should be
better by now, and Notepad shouldn't be the default development environment.
Maybe by the time I launch a site in 2014 (boy does that seem like a long way off)
we'll be using something that can finally make Notepad obsolete.
Entire contents copyright 2004 by David Strom, Inc.
David Strom, dstrom@cmp.com, +1 (516) 562-7151
Web Informant is (r) registered trademark with the
U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
ISSN #1524-6353 registered with U.S. Library of
Congress
If you'd like to subscribe (issues are sent via
email), please send an email to:
mailto:Informant-request@avolio.com?body=subscribe.