Web Development

The Look of a CMS

Saturday, 24 February 2007

To truly appreciate a CMS, you have to have had some experiences, good or bad in the way most websites are built. There are millions of people out there with their own websites built with free online tools. Usually these sites suffer from less than adequate graphics, code practices, and functionality due to the 'templated' nature of upload and click and drag type functions. Web developers that have spent many years learning, refining, and re-learning how to build decent websites know too well the pains that come with doing things by hand. Coding by hand in notepad. I remember my first webpage over 10 years with a laptop sitting at a coffeeshop. No wireless connections, just notepad and Netscape Navigator and IE. Most people at that time were still dialing up to America Online. Those were the good ol' days for America Online. I remember starting with Flash 4 and my Flash book by Sham Bangal. Awesome. I learned so much stuff: HTML, Flash, Photoshop. That was enough back then to build a website. Now you pick your poison of servers, server-side languages, client side language techniques, css, xhtml, who your audience is, search engine optimization and the million techniques that go with that.