Static Web Design: On Its Way Out?
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[From the blog of John Miller, July 1, 2006.]
In a few weeks, I'm heading up the web design workshop at the Intel Computer Clubhouse's Teen Summit. My task: to help 15 or so teenagers create a journalistically-slanted website covering the Summit. How to do it? What will make this website good or bad?
A good website...allows people to easily add information. If there's only one maintainer, this won't be too bad. The site design depends largely on how the maintainer likes to do things: write code by hand, use a wysiwyg editor, or use a content-management system. Simple sites can get away with hand-coding; it's not that much work to add a page or two, especially if you use templates. The hard work lies in creating templates. The same holds true for wysiwyg editors: they are perhaps less well-suited for creating new pages, but are quite nice for editing text or populating a template.
That leaves the content management system. Wouldn't it be nice just to go out to your site, fill out a form, and have a new blog entry? Better still to be able to edit any page on the site simply by filling out a web form. If you use the Internet, you know how to use a web browser; it's nearly a given. So CMSes are great for people with no prior web design knowledge.
