The Holistic Web

I’m excited. I’ve been in the online business for a while now, I published my first site in 1994, and started doing it full time in 95 or 96. I worked through the dotcom boom for a few companies ranging from a failed startup through to helping manage a relaunch of MSN globally. It was a rush back then, no doubt about it.

But recently I’ve been feeling that excitement again - the excitement of big change, of endless possibilities, of opportunities unexplored. I truly believe we have only scratched the surface with the web, and there’s still ideas and opportunities out there that haven’t been dreamed of.

I see two big differences between what’s happening now and what happened in the dotcom boom.

First, there’s real money now. There are lots of profitable online businesses. Yes, there’s still some silly valuations going on, time will tell how silly they are. But importantly, people aren’t ignoring profits like they did back then. We know it’s possible to make money - big money - on the web.

Secondly, and slightly more controversially, a lot of the dotcom boom was driven by techies. That’s a good thing and a bad thing. There’s still some of that around. However, I’m seeing a lot of techies completely missing the point of all the changes that are going on at the moment. For example, slashdot had a discussion today on AjaxWrite , an Ajax powered online word processor which is allegedly Microsoft Word compatible. There were some valid comments there, and yes, Ajax Write does currently suck, but they were so busy focussing on the technology, why their DOM usage was poor, why they should have been using a Java applet, or whatever, that they missed the point entirely: AjaxWrite will improve and it will get to the point where it’s good enough for a lot of users. It’s a text book disruptive technology. The point is lots of techies are missing the point of Dotcom Boom 2.0, focussing too much on the technology and less on how the technology is enabling average users to do really cool stuff. And that’s exciting because it leaves so many more opportunities for those who can see on both sides of the fence.

Yes, it’s a great time to be in the online space, there are opportunities out there and if you are smart, and as with any startup (online or otherwise) a bit lucky, the money will follow. I’m looking forward to grabbing my piece of the pie, and seeing & helping others to grab their piece. Bring on dotcom boom 2.0.

My mate Nick kindly invited me along to the launch of his new site last night. It’s called iTrainer, it’s basically an online personal trainer. It was a great party, and some truly sensational caprioscas were had by (almost) all.

It’s exciting to see a new online start up in Australia. There is so much interesting stuff happening in the online space at the moment. It’s like the dot com boom, but people have their blind folds off now, the emperor’s new clothes don’t look so good. I look forward to many new Aussie startups in the near future. And, well done Nick and Co on a great site, I hope it succeeds.

As regular readers would know, this blog deals almost exclusively with what I would call “business” related stuff. I love the internet and the online experience, and so to call it business is doing it a bit of an injustice.

However, I do have other interests besides things online, and I keep those off this blog. So, I just started another blog. It will be far less focussed than this one. Expect to read a lot about:

• The forthcoming Scott Walker CD, “The Drift”
• Other relatively esoteric music stuff
• Scott Walker
• Random gratuitous musings on life
• The new Scott Walker CD
• My forthcoming radio show??
• Whatever else I feel like

May I introduce to you the one and only Getting the Drift. I expect it to be not especially interesting to most of the readers of this blog, and I will plug it either very, very rarely or most likely not at all, so don’t expect lots of cross posting, this will probably be the first and last time I mention it.

“Vanilla” is a term that has come to mean plain or simple. It’s almost synonymous for a non-flavour, despite that (in my opinion) something with a strong vanilla flavour is very nice.

I recently read up on how vanilla is made. Far from being a simple harvesting process, it is extremely labour intensive, difficult, requires lots of time and hard work. It’s quite a fascinating process (did you know they pollinate the vanilla flowers by hand?). It takes a lot of behind the scenes work to produce something that seems so simple.

Isn’t that often the way with software? (including websites) Sometimes, to make something really simple is really hard work. There’s lots of people scurrying around behind the scenes so that the user can have an effortless experience, one that they barely notice as it’s all just “how it should be”.

I would like the websites I work on to be vanilla flavoured. Simple, effortless, and taken for granted by users (but not my clients!).

I started working with content management systems quite a while ago, from memory my first experience with a “proper” CMS was 1998. I’ve worked on a few since then, some good, some not so good, some downright dreadful.

For business people, the promises of a CMS seem like a holy grail. Empower users, automate workflow, cut out the technical middle man, audit trails, versioning, reduce mistakes, etc. In reality, I think CMSs rarely deliver on much of their promise, not to say that they aren’t useful. Still, I do wonder how many CMS deployments costing multiple hundreds of thousands could have been replaced by hiring a webmaster for $60K a year to manage the site.

In particular, and the focus of this post, is the actual act of editing the content, which is where the rubber hits the road in many ways. Most CMSs use some sort of web based editor - maybe RTE, Ektron, or a home grown one. My focus on the editor is because that’s the point where the empowerment happens. But, something funny happened on the way to empowerment. It seems that this empowerment promises three things. Updating a website should be:

1. Easy
2. Flexible
3. High quality

Now here’s the catch. I think it’s a case of pick any two. If you have a system that’s easy and flexible, the quality won’t be high. You can have flexible and high quality, but it won’t be easy.

Let me define those terms a bit more clearly:

Easy: can be used by a non-technical person with a maximum of a few hours training, ideally less. No HTML knowledge required.

Flexible: allows a very wide, ideally effectively unlimited, range of formatting and layouts.

High Quality: produces code which is robust cross browser and is W3C compliant, or something reasonable close to it at the very least. The HTML Microsoft Word produces would be diametrically opposed to high quality.

So, that’s my theory, the theory that is mine. An example would be front page. No, it’s not a CMS but it is an editor, and so for those purposes has the same qualities. It’s easy to use. It’s flexible. But the code quality? Pretty poor. However, I do personally use FrontPage sometimes, but because I know HTML well and can understand what frontpage is doing under the hood, the code it produces when I use it is clean. So it is capable of doing it, it’s just not easy. So front page falls down on the high quality front, which is the most common area CMSs fail.

I did once design a CMS that was easy to use, produced high quality code most of the time, and was kind of flexible, but it had its limits on flexibility. So it went some way to beating it, but had a way to go.

I’d be keen to hear from anyone who has used a CMS that has beat that theory, or at least gone some way. I’m working on a large site overhaul for a client at the moment, part of the project is deploying a CMS. I spent today reading some scoping work they’d already done, and I haven’t broken the bad news to them yet. If you can help me not have to I’d appreciate it