web publishing
ideas
Anna
jokes
tyrant tirade
Web Publishing
I'm a low-tech guy. Or maybe I should say "appropriate" tech. Not much 'in' to animated gifs, real-time chat. I find transaction-oriented websites rather boring to develop.
My niche is publishing. Very few people understand publishing on the web. It's brand new. Skills developed during years of wysiwyg publishing or years of database management are inappropriate.
Lots of people with shovels
You see this on the web today. Almost all websites are done miserably. A friend calls it the "Chinese Army" approach: just throw lots of people at the problem. It's horribly expensive, it's no fun, and quality is too difficult to achieve.
The web moves too fast. Lean sites working smart will blow the doors off flabby sites with processes that numb the brains of the workers.
Automate
The trick? Separate the content from the user interface. That makes either easy to change. Call that "site automation."
Then you can automate certain types of documents. You can make documents easy to maintain, but script the output so they appear in more interesting or useful formats.
There is also utility automation, as in the site-map, or an index.
Inclusiveness
The web values access. People won't always have the latest browsers. They might be in a library, or in Panama, or using a cell-phone with a four-line monitor, or (someday) a toaster-oven.
Solution: make several versions of your site. One can be as fancy as Paris fashions, but a plain version will give your customers access, even in adverse circumstances. "The customer is always right," right?
You can't do this without automating. But once you automate, it's cheap and easy.
Site Index
Speaking of index, I've created a couple of index systems. These are indexes like you see in the back of a book.
Search engines require that the user be skilled at searching, and understand the information and vocabulary. An index requires that the index creator be skilled. It is much easier for the user to explore.
ETRADE's online help amounts to something like 400 printed pages of material, separated into more than 200 html files. The index is a great way to find what you're looking for.
- Check out an index. (Click ">Index" in the upper right corner.)
Templates
How you combine the html from designers with the code from programmers is also a major advantage or disadvantage. My technology lets html designers create complete, valid, viewable html, and have all the processing done elsewhere.
This is one step better than Kiva, which is an order of magnitude ahead of things like Microsoft's Active Server Pages or iCat's templates, or typing html in Perl scripts.
Except for Kiva, you wind up with a complete mish-mash of program logic and html. The designer can't maintain it -- can't even know if they're seeing all the possible outputs. The programmers have to put huge blocks of html inside of their scripts.
If you were doing a small part of a Microsoft-owned AOL rip-off, Active Server Pages would be all right. But the effort required to maintain them throughout large websites is too great by at least an order of magnitude. Ease of maintenance is the key.
Tools
I've been automating publishing processes for more than a decade.
I have a suite of tools for cgi applications, to automate whole websites, to automate individual documents, to automate maintenance procedures, and more.
My Business
I design entire publishing automation systems, including work-flow management and dispatching files to live servers. With the infrastructure in place, I can then automate individual documents so that two or three people can maintain a site more easily and with higher quality than ten or fifteen people could do with typical tools.
You get quality, leisure time, sleep, more fun, less stress, the "bandwidth" to focus on high-leverage projects and you save big bucks!