Web Log Costa Blanca

Can you move a Web site based on a proprietary Content Management System to which you have only a customer’s access? The short answer would seem to be ‘no’. One UK Web company includes this question among its FAQs: “Can I move my CMS site to another hosting company?” The answer it gives is “This is not possible as the CMS software that we have developed must remain on our servers.”

There is a general summary of the position on an Australian Web site. This is (part of) what they say about CMS sites:

“Content Management Systems – a mixed blessing
An alternative to a personal web designer is a CMS or Content Management System. The main benefit of a CMS is the ability to update your site yourself – within certain parameters – over the internet, and rolling all your costs into one monthly payment. But you need to go into a CMS contract with your eyes open.
1. CMS do not provide distinctive sites. They are, almost by definition, formulaic. Look at some and see what you think.
2. You don’t own your CMS site in the same way that you own a site designed by a web designer. With CMS you own the content but you cannot walk away from your CMS contract with your site intact – your site can only operate on the CMS operator’s platform.
3. With a CMS website you are locked in – you cannot change to a hosting company that provides more competitive rates or better features without losing your website.”

Point 3 in effect repeats what the English company say about their own sites.

So what was I to do when I was asked to ‘move’ exactly such a Web site, by a potential client to whom I had been recommended—by people I would prefer not to let down?

Of course I said ‘yes’. I committed myself to recreating the site, i.e., constructing a completely new site that would look just like the client’s current site, with a completely new database, a new set of scripts (PHP rather than the current ASP), all the existing images (several hundred of them) and a client interface that let her do everything she had done with the old CMS.

How did I get on in this foolhardy enterprise? Answer in Part 2.

How do people feel about one-page Web sites? For myself, I think they are pretty important, while a real Web site is being developed behind the scenes.

I have a couple of Web sites in this position right now. One is for two karaoke presenters: brookies karaoke. The other is for a friend who wants to sell her unique spacious villa in Calpe. I am doing plenty of work behind the scenes, which the website owners can check out, but neither of the full Web sites are ready yet to go public.

Obviously, you can’t go anywhere further on the site from the home page of a one-page Web site—but at least you can find contact details. What is more, from a website designer’s/owner’s point of view, the minimal Web site is available to be noticed. (And, to my astonishment, Web search engines often find one-page Web sites quite fast.)

There are people who think that designing Web sites comes naturally to people who are computer-savvy. Other people think a good design is something visually appealing that they can see on a computer screen.

Bad luck. That isn’t what Web site design is at all.

Web site design is a form of information design, or communication design. On this blog, I’ve recently been developing a set of rules for good visual design. But visual design is only 10% of the iceberg. Real Web site design is the other 90%—the analysis and the research that precede and inform visual design.

What is the real purpose of this site? What are the things it has to offer people, because otherwise it might as well not exist? Who precisely is going to be visiting this site? Who precisely do we want to visit this site? What can we offer them when they get here? How can we make sure they get what they want—and in the way they want it? These questions have to be answered before a designer even sketches a page.

People don’t want to spend time on Web sites. They certainly don’t come for the scenery. They want to find out answers to their questions, buy a product, arrange for a service—and then get on with their lives.

Yes, visual design is important. But what that means is communicating efficiently with a specific set of users. So it can’t start until the site concept has been unambiguously defined. It has to come after overall site design, or site structuring. It has to come after navigation design. And in itself, it has to allow users to scan fast, get what they want, and leave. A page which is visually appealing in its own right may be an absolute disaster as visual communication of a message.

At its worst, the sort of design of which your uncle says, “Oh, that’s really good,” is designer-centred design, ‘Look, Ma, no hands!’ stuff. I have one glaring local example in mind, but before I spring it on you, I’ll have a bit more to say about designer-centred design in my next post.

Well, I’ve only got two rules out, and my most recently published website is breaking them.

The site is for a laser stop-smoking technician here in Calpe: Laser Stop-Smoking.

Well, it’s not actually breaking them. It has a fixed-size display ‘page,’ just as I recommend. But it’s not 960 pixels wide.

Why not? Because the client gave me just three images she wanted to use on her site, one of which was her logo, and they were all three of them 730 pixels wide. I guess I could have put them to left and right of a wider page, but they would have looked odd, even—as my poor dead brother Paul would have said—‘daft.’ (He used to say this in the accent he picked up from kids he taught in Liverpool. It was telling.)

I experimented for days and days (as I do) and eventually decided that the only way to work with such beautiful striking images was to go with them. So the page is 732 pixels wide (a pixel of padding on either side, since that looked better to me after many alternative tries).

The cross-page photos are so eye-catching that I can’t really put more photos between them. On the other hand, there are now areas of unbroken text. (Well, again, not really. See rule N about tight headings, and rule N+1 about how many words to spread across a page. I’ll get to them before long.) They still need a bit of livening up.

Feel free to go back to the site in a week or two and see if I’ve worked out anything inventive.

Just in case anyone misunderstood, the Web site design rules that I am making up as I go along are visual design rules.

When I said, a couple of weeks ago, that “this is where we start,” I didn’t mean that this was the beginning of serious Web site design. Obviously, we start with goals and objectives and users and scenarios (lots of stuff about this earlier in this blog—I won’t insult you by saying where). I am assuming now that this stuff is done, and we are at this moment looking at a white screen on a monitor, and working out a visual design.

These are the rules we need.