456bereastreet.com — 10 tips for organisations about to start a new website project, whether they are building a completely new website or redesigning their current one: Most people in the Web industry are clueless, You only get what you pay for, Don’t start your project with buying a CMS.
Aug 31, 2006 View in Crawl 4
jiltedcitizenSep 1, 2006
I believe the CMS remark was meant to be, don't buy something before researching your needs. Also web designers are not web developers. One makes the site pretty, the other makes it work. It is rare that someone can do both. Developers are not designers. Designers are not developers.
wistarSep 1, 2006
I agree. Prices on a web site are extremely useful. Particularly for products that may not be very familiar to people and whose pricing could be anything from a few dollars to tens of thousands of dollars. A great example is Discreet (Autodesk) Inferno, Flame and Flint software. Suppose you are trying to investigate the feasibility of building a studio or adding a Inferno system and you just want to have some basic idea as to whether or not it is even within the realm of possibility. It's not possible because they don't publish their prices. You might then take a guess at the prices by looking at similar desktop systems and thinking that the software might be, say, $5,000 but certainly not more than $10,000. Unfortunately, when you tried to move forward, after a lot of time invested, you'd come to find out, and likely with some horror, that Inferno is nearly $250,000.There are lots of examples like this. I recently had a gallery send me a series of photos of oil paintings they had for sale but without any prices. By looking at them, I had no way of knowing whether the paintings were a few hundred, a few thousand, a few tens of thousands or a few hundred thousand dollars. I liked one of the pieces and inquired about it only to find that it was $70,000 and completely, impossibly, out of any semblance of my range of affordability. That cost me time and was annoying and I told the gallery so. They now send ballpark prices out.Sorry to go on foaming at the mouth but it's a big pet peeve of mine.
psychotronSep 1, 2006
Although you are right about one not being the other, it is becoming clear that people are beginning to expect both skills in one person. Craigslist is not a good example, but that is one place where you see employers that want someone who "is proficient with Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, PHP, MySQL and .NET". In other words Designer/Developer. Search through various job websites and you will see lots of Designer/Developer jobs. Any smart person that has one skill would benefit greatly by studying the other. Your choices for jobs/projects will increase greatly and you get to charge more!
iamcamSep 1, 2006
I think the reason why a CMS is appealing is because you can get people who know squat about coding HTML (or using Dreamweaver, for that matter) to update content with no hassle. Speaking from experience, the CMS solution saves a lot of money and headaches in the long run.
thund3rstruckSep 2, 2006
It all depends on the client. Some clients don't need a SQL backend, a shopping cart, or any other kind of dynamic content. In this case a good css template and 5 pages of static content will suit them just fine. I think a lot of pro web developers intentionally try to make things more complicated than they really are. I just completed a job where the customer had heard from others that his business needed a complete SQL backend, .NET forms, etc when in fact all he needed was a simple HTML/CSS static site with a few simple forms (data stored in XML). No need for all the other and it meets his needs perfectly. $500 for 2.5 hours of work, everyone was happy.
chewie67Sep 7, 2006
Of the hundreds of web sites I've developed, I'd bet there have been less than 5 clients that could manage DreamWeaver and FTP.The cold, harsh reality is that A LOT of people can barely write an email or surf past the home page AOL gives them. An HTML tool like DreamWeaver is way past what they can handle -- without totally messing up what we create for them.