[thelist] Content Publishing Systems Squash News Design

aardvark roselli at earthlink.net
Mon May 20 11:13:01 CDT 2002


> From: Michael Kimsal <michael at tapinternet.com>
>
> I think part of the reason developers 'refuse' to implement more
> than one (or two in our case) templates is that you often
> don't know how much data will be on the screen.  Some content may be

i tend to agree, but as i sit on both sides of the fence, i build
designs and templates to handle, ideally, in infinite amount of data,
or the amount of data contained within the bounds of the content
system behind said template...

> long, some short.  To keep everything 'boring' may infuriate some
> designers, but the reason a system is being implemented in the first
> place is that there's too much for the people to handle on a timely
> basis by hand.
>
> Ensuring that things *work* as expected, before concentrating on the
> visual changes for various sections of a site, is always *our* first
> concern.

agreed... as it was with my own CMS implementation(s)...

> Hopefully the days are passing when people judge a site *solely*
> on its looks.  I don't think we'll ever get past
> judging a book by its cover completely, but projects we're involved in
> tend to *do* more, although the visuals may not be appealing to a
> designer who is used to being able to tweak every 'page' individually.

i've often found that the case... you have to balance between
usability/utility and eye candy... a difficult line to walk, often...

> If someone is going to insist on coming up with an invidual 'look' for
> each 'page', they may as well stick to doing everything by hand,
> because there's little or no need for any type of automation system at
> that point.

i think building templates per type of document is very effective...
my own company site (algonquinstudios.com) uses 8 templates
depending on the type of content (case study vs. press release vs.
generic document, etc.), and that same content is shared by a
sister site (quantumcms.com) which has an additional 5 templates
on top of the content... and then i'm adding another sister site
which will have another 5 or so templates...

ideally, creating multiple templates should be handled after you
know the extremes they'll have to support...


--
Read the evolt.org case study
Usability: The Site Speaks for Itself
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1904151035/evoltorg
ISBN: 1904151035



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