the moving finger
writes and having written moves on
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Comparing apples with...
One of the more intesting things I get to do at work is provide 'advice' on building/designing/web2.0ifying websites for our clients.
Almost invariably they come to me with the same basic issue, they have an old, out of date website that they find impossible to maintain and update. It's usually hosted somewhere else (and more often than you'd think - they don't know where) and if they have any access to it at all it's through some weird homebrew CMS.
*Sidebar - there must have been a squillion 'web design agencies' 2-5 years ago building their own CMS for clients.
There are 3 main parts to the advice I offer
1) Information Architecture/Site Navigation: What do you want on your site? What sections does it need? How do those sections interrelate? How do you use your website? How do your users use your website? What pages do they look at most? What pages do you want them to look at? What do you want them to do (if anything) as a result of being on your website? etc
2) Content review: Is the content written with a web audience in mind? are you making full use of the 'interactivity' of your site? Is your site just an electronic brochure? Is the content up to date? Is the content written so that it will date quickly? etc
3) Technical Advice: How much traffic does your site get? What functionality do you need from a CMS? How technical are the people who will be maintaining the site? How scalable does the solution have to be? What do you want to be able to do with the site? etc
It's this last piece that is the source of today's title - when I'm giving technical advice I find myself comparing wordpress to blogger to joomla to drupal to 'the existing solution - whatever that is'
I'm always careful to do the comparisons in terms of "If you need feature X and option A then you probably want to consider product G - if on the other hand you want feature Z and option B then product H is probably a better fit"
But despite that (or perhaps because of it) I still find myself getting asked "But which is best?"
Today I finally snapped. I took a deep breath and said to the client...
"It's not a matter of 'best' they're different. It's not comparing apples to apples - you're not even comparing apples to oranges - you're comparing apples to - magpies - or forklifts. One's great if you want a snack - the other is useful if you need to move things."
Sadly, I still don't think it got through.
