A straw poll for people who look after websites...

[lostcarpark]

Lots of poeple look after different types of websites, whether it's a personal site hosted on something like MySpace, right up to a a corporate e-commerce site clustered across hundreds of servers.

If you find, or have ever found yourself in such a position, I'd like to know what's the one thing about the experience that ticks/ticked you off the most. Could you post a tiny bit about the site in question (no need to identify it unless you want to), your role, how the site is/was maintained, and either the thing that you found really annoying, or something you thought that would have made your life a lot easier.

This sort of ties into something I'm working on. I'm not promising I'll be able to make your life easier, but I'm not saying I won't...

Comments

[spodlife]

My parents have a website for their business. The hardest thing is for them to understand the overall management of HTML documents, so now I have the whole thing stored in a Subversion repository. Before updates hit the website I massage the content to conform.

I want a tool or method which makes layout and common content (ie. menu bar) easier.

[lostcarpark.livejournal.com]

One of the problems in my experience is that the different elements of a website all tend to get mixed up together. So if you're a web designer, you also get caught up in programming to make things like menus work, and content management.

It's probably a little days of printing, where a typesetter needed to know all the details of how a printing machine worked so they could lay out type that wouldn't jam the machine, or leave black blotches on the paper. Nowadays the exact method of reproduction is of no consequence to the graphic designer, and the tools used abstract all of the details so he or she can get on with just designing.

We need to get to a similar state with web design. A web designer shouldn't need to know the intricacies of HTML or CSS, or how to get around the peculiarities of different browsers, they should be able just create a design and it should work. And they shouldn't have to worry about programming tasks like making menus or feedback forms or online shopping services work. It should just be a case of drag it on and the site will know how to make it work.

In many case someone entirely different will be maintaining the content, and they shouldn't have to worry about that stuff either, or wonder will their content render correctly in the designer's peculiar template. They should be able to just edit the content (or upload their hundreds of Word documents), and they should work.

And, then there's the whole technical end of servers and protocols and DNS mappings that end users too often get troubled with.

I think we've got a long way to go in this department. I've looked at existing CMS solutions, and I'm not convinced that any of them have got it right yet.

[spodlife]

I like LJ as a content management system, but that's because my content is a diary.

I have heard of people using wikis and then trying to hide the editability to normal viewers.

[lostcarpark.livejournal.com]

LJ is not at all bad for the types of content it's suitable for. And it does effectively separate the content from the design. It's not quite so good for separating the design from the underlying browser architecture.