Building websites is easy. Maintaining websites is hard.
Everyone spends a lot of time choosing, using, and complaining about their CMS.
We build templates to control the design and layout of our site, except for the Big Black Hole of Most Important Content on the Page. Then, we force the content creators and maintainers to be designers and layout, ers?
The WYSIWYG promised to make content maintenance easier, but what you see is rarely very close to what you get. WYSIWYG is a lie.
But why are asking content creators to worry about formatting and layout, anyway?
We were asked to build a news site for JHU, and we decided to build a news database, with a news API, and a news site.
In order to store the news content in a reusable way, we broke down a news story into STRUCTURED CONTENT. It was hard, and it took a while, and we made a ton of mistakes, but we have a really powerful system that will be reusable for a long time.
--
We build templates for our websites to control the design and layout and make it consistent across all of our pages. But when it comes to the Big Huge Area of Most Important Content on Every Page, we force the content creators and maintainers to be designers and layout-ers.
When we were asked to build a news site for Johns Hopkins, we decided to make our jobs a lot harder and build a news site on top of a news API on top of a news database. Building a system like that required us to break up our content into structured chunks and store each piece individually. It was hard, it took a long time, and we made a ton of mistakes, but we are on our way to building a really powerful system that provides infinitely reusable content to everyone in our institution.