Just a question of methods…
As I said earlier to Tresadenn, blogging in english is a bit difficult, especially when you want to post quite often.
You’ve got ideas, start writing, do something else and just let the post going to dust because you just forgot what you wanted to talk about in the first place.
Today, I’m trying a new technique (should i say method ? 
)… I just set a big white page on my 24″ screen and I’m writing with the zoom at maximum, it’s quite a good way to dive in your text and your thoughts.
Well, that’s enough for the pseudo philosophy, let’s go straight to the main topic : Web site development methodology
1. a matter of content !
People starting to have real bad habits about creating and gathering content for a website.
When you start speaking with your client (or whatever you call him) you quickly find out that behind the idea of creating a website, he didn’t think about the content itself.
It should be the starting point of your website, even google found out that the keywords and short descriptions could lead to a bunch of nonsense and started to think of indexing content itself rather than stuff you could cheat with !
This content have actually two major impacts on the rest of the develoment regarding the graphics and the final cost of the site.
How many times I had to re-think or adapt the graphics with the designer because we needed more space to put all the client’s content.
To take a shorcut, it’s just nonsense to think that you can put 15 people in a Ferarri !
The graphic design should be tailored with your content, not the other way, it’s really important to have a major part of it at the very beginning of the project.
As I said above, it can also have an impact on the final cost. If you’re start the project, and discover in the middle of it that you need to add powerful import filters and change the structure of the database you can expect unsatisfaction for customer, it’s a big risk.
2. I’m a developer, not a copy machine !
A few years back, Web Development was just about creating HTML structures and fill it with content. All you needed was a solid knowledge of this markup system.
With the evolution of tools and the development of CMS, customers wanted more control on the edition tool. The developers’ job evolved as well to create powerful, but user-friendly, tools for masses.
Great, but that’s the point ?
Fairly simple, developers are not copy machine in two ways, first of all, web site coding can not be sum up as « take this portion of code from this site, you will save time and our money as well! »
If it’s obvious for some, how many developers heard that kind of sentence which leads to tools full of bugs. To save time, you create new bugs by patching old lines of codes without thinking of what might happen in other portions of the site, maybe the function you updated is used somewhere else you know… you then create coders nightmares which will in the end cost more money to maintain and update.
It’s also a waste of time to take a developer and make him fill the content for the client.
Let’s put it this way, if you create the tool and noone except you is using it, what’s the point ? Let’s just go back in the 90′s, HTML is real good you know
The project manager should be the first one to use it in order to adjust your development. He knows the client (or at least he should) and should be able to know what’s best for the administrator, or editor, of the web site.
Well, that’s all for now, once again what is expressed on this post his just a few personnal ideas about web site development.
Feel free to express you opinion, this is not a closed subject.
See ya,
jeFFF
[UPDATE] Really interesting article about content @ Web Designer Depot, It really worth reading : <www.webdesignerdepot.com/2011/03/how-to-spot-and-avoid-web-copy-that-kills-websites>
