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wherever you go, there you are

Submitted by danem on Wed, 05/19/2010 - 23:30
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I do love writing and posting things, but I hate how previously I've been writing on websites that claim ownership of my stuff. Someone told me that Facebook's terms of service still says they have rights to everything you put up. If this is true, I don't want the best that I do, where it doesn't involve the connections with people that I use Facebook for, to be on Facebook.

So I'm taking my writing to this little site that I'm making, and not just for this reason, there is another--I have over the past four years become passionate about something else that not a lot of people understand. Yes, I'm talking about making GOOD websites.

I'm a perfectionist of sorts, but it goes beyond making things perfect, because things are never perfect. I want them to be insanely good. I want to create things that you don't just say "well that's nice", or "that's good". I want people to say "that's great!" I want them to WEEP because what just passed before their eyes that I made, that I was involved in somehow, was the best that it could possibly be.

Like many other things in life, websites need to be done right. In my experience, these are the obstacles that keep a website from being done right:

  • Super bad code, because of visual tools like Dreamweaver and such, make designs harder to "fix" and content harder to post.
  • No user interface that lets the content creators write the content themselves, causing all updates to go through a technical middle person, which makes updates take longer.
  • No centralized stylesheet (in combination with the bad code above), which means redesigns take longer.
  • Visual design that is not current or makes no sense, causing users to vomit and go to competitors.
  • A lack of a dynamic framework that makes creating newer website features (blogging, comments, archiving, webforms) more difficult or impossible.
  • A bad webhost can cause all kinds of limitations on a good website, including unnecessary expense, too much down time, or lack of technical capability.

Now I know many stakeholders in websites don't care about what's under the hood, but they should in the sense that everything I listed here has a real result in the world of having a website. Do you want people to access information from your website on an iPhone or Droid, perhaps through a mobile version or a special app? Well the first thing I mentioned on my list is the key to being able to do that. If your website is a bunch of files thrown to the wind, there ARE no secondary versions of your site. Do you want there to be a more printer friendly output on printers from your site? Same thing!

So here are my solutions to the problems:

  • Write the site in standards compliant code. There should be two different kinds of code in the site--one for the content (html) and another for what it looks like (css). Learn the rules and follow them.
  • Get the site on some sort of CMS (content management system), preferably one that will let you have a nice toolbar resembling what Microsoft Word uses, with buttons for headers, boldface and so on.
  • All pages on the site need to reference a single CSS file, and that file is the ONLY thing that determines the layout of the site. The entire site can be redesigned in about the time it takes to create a new CSS file, and without copying the content from one template to the other.
  • Current trends in design and general good taste should be followed when making a site. It should be appropriate to the site's purpose. And everything should make sense.
  • A CMS will usually have all the framework you need to create new features that most websites need. Drupal (what this site is sitting on), lets me put up useful webforms, polls within minutes, and it archives posts and pages without me even thinking about it, all in the context of the same site.
  • There are many webhosts out there, but choose one that lets you have a lot of bandwidth, and has features you need such as PHP, mySQL, etc.

To the end of the lists above, I've pledged to master all skills involving this very thing that I want to be an expert in. The past few months, I've already done a lot of hilarious mistakes and "take ones" in the privacy of my home computer, but I am getting there. As I sit back and laugh at bad sites that others out there are doing, I also look at sites I want to emulate, sites I look at and say "I want to do it like that", and then sit and try to do them. But for now, in public, is a simple design that came with the CMS that I'll be able to change in minutes when I'm ready.

Life is OK, I have many other things going on, for sure. For the two or three of you that may happen to check this, come again. It'll only get better.