Content Is King
I was looking at the WORLD the other day. 🙂 And thinking about these groups that want a really cool site. And I realized (after a few retail gigs) that these sites need copywriters — content makers — not more development.
You ever run into one of these kind of sites — the start of a good idea with a post or two and that’s it?
You and I BOTH know we don’t mess around with WYSIWYG when coding; baaaaad idea. Bad bad bad. (Although we do code generation for instance scaffolding — which is in a sense kind of WYSIWYG for developers. Hmmmmm . . . )
But. A church, a political group, a neighborhood group here all asked me for help. I looked and thought . . well christ there’s no effin content.
I mean even the most non-tech person could do the technical piece Web 0.5 beta site like this:
http://maddox.xmission.com/
Or this:
http://www.waynesthisandthat.com/
But not everyone could do all that awesome content.
Content is King.
So I am always looking for tools to make life easier for people, or build them myself. Like this guy here for instance – http://www.spacejock.com/Software.html. How awesome. So what if some are coded in VB6, he made cool stuff people use.
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Role of Developers?
Think about it. Why would I ask a business user to learn CSS? That would be like asking them which spanner to use during a head gasket rebuild.
Extending this idea a bit, I always get into arguments with an architect I know — about something like this topic. He’s always saying “we need to make things easier” and we talk about Node.js or such. Yes these are making things like rest api’s more like building content.
But . . . someone had to develop Node in C language. That’s where the developer comes in, laying out those rules in a language so that the derivative becomes the palette for the next content creator. I’ve had the same arguments with “new school” developers — python and etc. — arguing that service busses etc. are from days gone by and then move on to build them . . .in python. Well, a rewrite of anything works better (my theory of “set in stone” — when you pick your libraries that’s it, it’s over for good for that software). But to say service busses are old, well, that’s like saying writing is old. The client activities are not the same as development . . .