Written on a Sunday afternoon...

Reflection on Sunday afternoons, as described by the late Douglas Adams

Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged is a man with a purpose. Not a very good purpose, as he would be the first to admit, but it keeps him busy. Keeps him on the move. For Wowbagger is one of the Universe’s very small number of immortal beings.

Most of those who are born to immortality instinctively know how to cope with it, but Wowbagger is not one of their number. Indeed, he has come to hate them, and refers to them as ‘the load of serene bastards’.

He had his immortality inadvertently thrust upon him after an unfortunate accident with an irrational particle accelerator, a liquid lunch, and a pair of rubber bands. The precise details are not important because no one has ever managed to duplicate the exact circumstances under which it happened, although many people have ended up looking very silly, or very dead or, more often than not, both, trying.

To begin with it was fun, he had a ball, living dangerously, taking risks, cleaning up on high-yield long-term investments, and just generally outliving the hell out of everybody. But even the attractions of immortality can pass, in the end it was Sunday afternoons he just couldn’t cope with, and that terrible listlessness that starts to set in at about 2:55 when you know you’ve taken all the baths you can usefully take that day, or that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the newspaper you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o’clock, and you will enter the ‘Long Dark Teatime of the Soul’.

So things began to pall for him. The smug smiles he used to wear at other people’s funerals began to fade. He began to despise the Universe in general, and everybody in it in particular.

And it was at this point at which he conceived his purpose, the thing that would drive him on, and which, as far as he could see, would drive him on forever. It was this:

He would insult the Universe.

That is, he would insult everybody in it. Individually, personally, one by one, and (this was the thing he really decided to grit his teeth over) in Alphabetical Order.

When people protested to him, as they sometimes did, that the plan was not merely misguided but actually impossible because of the number of people being born and dying all the time, he would merely fix them with a steely look and say, “A man can dream, can’t he?”

The dangers of Content Managed (CMS) Websites

Today I read an online article about the dangers of relying on a Content Management System (CMS) driven website to present your business to the web world and potential clients therein. It gave me something to think about. My initial view was that the article would be all about online security, hacking attacks and the like but, in fact, it was really about design and content integrity.

The thing is, setting up a content-managed website nowadays is not the huge financial expense that it once was. There are some great off-the-shelf CMS packages out there now such as Jooma!, WordPress and even New Zealand’s SilverStripe. There are a wide range of template designs available, many for free and others at a nominal cost. There are free blog services (yes, even blogspot.com) which are easy to use and can even be configured to connect through individual domain names. So why do we need to hire web designers? What’s to prevent your average small or mid-sized business downloading one of these packages and uploading the contents to a hosting server or opening a blogspot account, setting all the necessary passwords and permissions and publishing their own web content?

While the obstacles of designing and coding a website can be effectively bypassed, there are still definite security concerns when using an off-the-shelf CMS. The very fact that these packages can be downloaded and easily configured means that hackers can also download copies and look for ‘xploits’ – weaknesses in the code that can be exploited to enable the hacker to take control of installed copies of the software. The companies that write the CMS packages are constantly on the watch for this kind of activity and, as is common practice for software companies, release patches and updates to address new security concerns. However if a site is running on an older version CMS it is are potentially at risk. Do the site owners have the technical smarts to upgrade the CMS to the latest version without losing site content? And if they are running third-party extensions to add functionality to their site, are these compromising the integral security of the site? Are these extensions the latest and most secure versions?

Security concerns aside there are also design concerns. Is there a template available that fits in with the company image and branding? Can the company logo be displayed on the site pages, and can it be displayed ‘correctly’ (note: there is much more to this than simply having the logo appear on a page)? Are the colours a match to brand identity? What about typography? How many other individuals in cyberspace are using the same template? How much time is it going to take to do this work (in business nothing is ever ‘free’), and who is available to do it? Could their time be better utilised? And above all, how many design compromises should be made in the interest of having a ‘free’ website design?

It is here, of course, that the web or graphic designer comes into play. An industry professional can design a website that addresses these concerns for a one-off fee, and connect it to an easy-to-use CMS. They will include the company’s brand identity and logo, taking into account design considerations such as clearspace, typography, use of web-safe colour matches to brand colours, and introducing the special touches that embellish and enhance a brand and make the website a unique and logical extension of the brand. They can be contracted to provide site hosting, take care of security and keep the CMS version up to date. And the business owner can take it from there.

There are other considerations, however. The integrity of site content is every bit as important as the integrity of the CMS or the site design. Writing for the web is an art in itself, it is different to other written forms of communication. Web content should be split in to small, easy to read ‘chunks’. It is often less formal than heavyweight corporate documentation. It should be written in the same ‘voice’ - consistent use of language and written style. And, perhaps most importantly, it should contain keywords and phrases that help in search engine queries.

Site owners editing or changing these keywords and phrases can adversely affect search engine results. Careless editing by inexperienced persons can result in uneven or irregular formatting and paragraph spacing. Images might be uploaded that are ‘cheesy’ stock images used elsewhere that are inappropriate to the visual integrity of the site or that are simply too large (in terms of file size and download times) to display well. New site content should always be checked against the rest of the site to ensure that the writing style and language match it is in keeping with published content. Is the meaning of the content still clear or has it been compromised by excessive jargon or stock industry phrases? Is the subject matter clearly, simply and completely explained? And finally, there’s also grammar to be checked and the essential spelling checks to be made.

Any shortcuts in these areas can result in the design and content integrity of the website being compromised, with the initial investment in the site being drastically reduced. The site simply doesn’t perform as well as it should. It loses value as time passes. And eventually it becomes worthless. Worse still, in time it can actually work against it’s owner. Badly-designed and badly-maintained sites diminish the owner’s credibility with potential clients.

That’s not to say that I am opposed to Content-Managed sites at all. In fact CMS systems are a great tool that enables the site owner to keep their site fresh and current – always important when publishing information online. But appropriate care needs to be taken when site owners assume responsibility for site content.

Finally, it always pays to keep the site designer on-side to perform special tasks that might be slightly outside the ordinary. And get them to periodically audit site content as a ‘fresh pair of eyes’ to ensure that everything is still on track!