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Zeldman

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Zeldman

: “Our stupid industry pitifully undervalues good web writing.” Bravo! In my experience this is completely correct. Sadly a lot of writers resist learning about the web as well, and so can’t transition to becoming good web writers in the first place.

Zeldman does repeat the old saw that people don’t read, though, which I simply don’t believe. They don’t read everything on every page. But if there’s actual unique content, they’ll read it. They do every day – millions of people read websites very thoroughly. But in general I agree with the proposition.

I approach this from the point of view that the workflow involved in developing sites is fatally flawed. Contrary to many, I don’t believe websites are primarily IS/IT projects, or that they should be managed by technical managers. Of all the activities that must be carried out to make a successful website, only about 30% of these are “technical” in the sense that a programmer, DBA, or other coder must be involved. Content development, graphic design, IA – all these are more fundamental to the development of a website than ANY technical function. The leadership of a web project should be done by a person who can speak intelligently to all of those folks: the editors and writers, the programmers doing any application development or DB work, the IA person and the graphic designer. And each of those functions should be done in concert with all the others on the team.

There’s also an

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interesting thread going on over at Peter Merholz’ site following his post, “Thoughts on the definition and community of ‘information architecture’“.

For my part, everything I’ve seen lately about IA suggests that it expands far beyond the range of things that I generally consider IA. In many ways the role as it is currently being defined is what I consider to be the product or project manager’s role. And I don’t think that’s the right way to go. In my work, I absolutely would not want the IA person to have the designer report to her or him. It is precisely the tension between these two related, but different, roles that I think gives the best opportunity of getting it right.

Same goes for content definition. I want the tension between the conflicting ideas of the IA and a site’s editor (assuming it’s a content-rich site you’re working on) to go to work, which if managed properly will produce interesting results.

In my ideal org chart, there is a project manager and reporting to her or him are a) an editor; b) a lead designer; c) a lead programmer/application developer; and, d) an IA. They do their work, each taking the lead on different aspects of the project but working as a team.

Mr. Derek Powazek

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has given birth to his book, Design for Community! Huzzah! Huzzah!

I’ve never written a book, but I have had the experience of holding a book I helped produce (I co-designed, layed out, and helped edit) in my hot little hands when it first arrived from the publisher. I have had very few more satisfying feelings than that one – so I can just imagine how great Derek feels holding his book having written the thing!

All of which prompted an expensive day at Amazon yesterday. I bought DfC, Jeff Veen’s book, and the new-ish edition of Rheingold’s classic The Virtual Community, in which I believe my name is mentioned (among many others, a testament more to Howard’s supreme graciousness than to any contribution I may have made) in the Forward.

Ummm, it’s about both

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. The Talking Moose waded out of the mud and into the fire with his piece yesterday. It’s the most ridiculous thing the Moose, who has otherwise been a very interesting read, has ever published.

The poor Moose clearly doesn’t understand what web designers, as opposed to code monkeys or integrators, do for a living. He seems to think they need or want to code every page or something inane like that. On personal sites that may be true, but that’s just for fun.

You can’t do content management properly – or even do it at all – without a damn good designer figuring out how to make it look, and with a damn good coder to make that design work with the content management system, and without a damn good architect to make sure that it fits together well through time.

I’m just old school enough to think that all of those roles – designer, coder, and architect – are best done by a single person. But none of those interests are antithetical to using a content management system to actually make it all happen on a day-to-day basis. In fact, a CMS can’t be implemented efficiently unless those folks do good work first – otherwise, the benefit of the CMS is lost in a miasma of snippets and included code and exception-fixing.

Of course the irony is that the Talking Moose site itself is a good example of this fact. Bryan Bell couldn’t have casually changed the design of the Moose had his code (made up of HTML and CSS) not been clean and useful to begin with. Likewise, had Dave and the gang at Userland not built a weblog architecture whose function enabled the weblog form (with the calendar-based navigation etc.), Bell’s work would have been useless. And the “design” (defined strictly) would be a secondary concern had both of those things not been done well for the task at hand.

It’s absolutely about design and the kind of work people like Zeldman do and it’s all about integrating content management systems as closely as possible to the writers and other “content people” who are doing the publishing. There’s no fight here, though the Moose seems to have wanted to stir one up.

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