[thelist] whatis.com redesigned into uselessness.

[Madhu Menon]

>quite an interesting difference in tone, eh?

 From that message, it sounds like the gentleman was a poor techie (like 
some of us) who had to fight the tyranny of management and the "suits". 
God, I hate those clueless management types.

>he also asked about content management systems (expressing doubt that they
>would switch from vignette at this point) so in my reply back to him, i
>pointed him to martin's article http://evolt.org/index.cfm?menu=8&cid=1449
>and the camworld page http://www.camworld.com/cms/

OK. I've got to ask here. Exactly why on earth did they NEED to move to 
StoryServer? We have some guys inhouse who underwent training on it and I 
can tell you that it is a *very* labour intensive process to get it up and 
running. (So much so that CNET USA has recommended to us that none of the 
Asian CNET sites migrate to it, due to the manpower required; and they 
built the damn thing).

Exactly what is so complex about the content management requirements for 
whatis.com? At the end of the day, it revolves around a database of terms 
and their definitions. Relatively simply DB design. Heck, coding the entire 
site should be a day's job on most platform/db combinations. (OK, I'm 
talking about the core programming part). Why deploy expensive technology 
like Vignette?

My guess is that some suit (the kind Rudy loves - not) said, "Hey, 
apparently CNET, ZDNET, Industry Standard, and many of the big tech sites 
out there use StoryServer. Let's go implement it too. Then we too will be 
in the big league." and a stupid purchase decision was made. Bah!

God, I hate those clueless pointy haired bosses. Unfortunately, I have not 
yet been fortunate enough to work with a techie who made it to the top 
position. It's usually the blue chip MBA who seems to be there.

>i also went into some detail explaining why those lovely self-descriptive
>urls such as http://www.whatis.com/icejello.htm should be preserved
>(translated, redirected, whatever) instead of ending
>up in 404s

The least they could have done was have a custom 404 error page that would 
extract the term out of the URL, search their database, and then redirect 
them to the correct page for this automatically. Again, an hour or two of 
coding at most. But how much annoyance and anger has it generated on this 
list alone? All avoidable...

Oh well, I guess someone must write an article about things to do when 
doing a redesign.

Enough ranting now, I think.

Madhu

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Madhu Menon
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