Composition II in
Red, Blue, and Yellow
by Piet Mondrian

1930

Whassup?

03-15-2009 • 23:42

Well, we've created another quickie template. We call this one 'Wireframe', and it was inspired by the works of Piet Mondrian. So, once again we have a template to use as a test bed for a CMS that has not yet been chosen. We are currently looking at what's available. There are over 100 CMS options to pick through, most of them 'open-source', which means a committee was involved in their development. You know what that means— there ain't many that are the least bit lightweight, elegant, nor fast and easy to implement into a non-native template. But we're lookin'. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Some Thoughts...

03-16-2009 • 21:56

What else are we looking for? We are Web designers— we create the website for the client. Do we, as web designers, need a full-blown CMS or blog engine to create a functional, basic website? Nope. We use a text editor which works just fine. The problem is that many of our clients find it very handy (and cheaper) to revise the text content on their site without involving us. That's all fine and dandy, but how can they do that as efficiently as possible? Is it absolutely necessary for the client to open a big site administration web page simply to do a little WYSIWYG editing? Why not eliminate the bulky middleman and simply open the page content files in an editor like tinyMCE that recognizes the page CSS files? That's what we're doing while updating this page. TinyMCE is spiffy, and used by many CMS setups for content editing. But it's also handy as a stand-alone utility.

It's true that this is a static Web page. No database involved. The focus of our concern here is the small business or personal website that requires a bit of revising now and then— i.e. a restaurant site. Yes, a busy blogger or e-commerce client would be better served with a CMS, but this little rant is only about those clients that pay for a basic site setup, and then need an easy way to update it. Has any code developer given them some thought?