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Ask Slashdot: Has the Time Passed For Coding Website from Scratch?
First time accepted submitter thomawack writes As a designer I always do webdesign from scratch and put them into CMSMS. Frameworks are too complicated to work into, their code is usually bloated and adaptable online solutions are/were limited in options. I know my way around html/css, but I am not a programmer. My problem is, always starting from scratch has become too expensive for most customers. I see more and more online adaptive solutions that seem to be more flexible, but I am a bit overwhelmed because there are so many solutions around. Is there something you can recommend?
Setup Dosbox runniing wordstar to do mailmerges to generate your temp pages.
That shit is hand tuned assembler, it will scream.
You wouldn't grow your own wheat, sugar cane, raise chickensc, etc for the ingredients for your choclate chip cookies. Just go buy the dough from the store. Good enough for 90% of clients out there. For the other 10%, you might make from scratch but you are still going to use store-bought ingredients.
...and write a generator, to your own specification.
Well, it really depends what they need but most folks want a website they can 'control' to some ability and with lot's of built in features. As you said there are many CMS' out there. I'd say pick one which appeals to you, maybe one which has a separate template system, since you're a designer, you can make a nice front end, that is all they will care about anyway. (with template scaffolding this should speed up development time).
/. will dismiss this and laugh but personally if i'm building a site for someone (usually for no money and limited time) I just install wordpress, 'secure it', then use or modify a theme. Just basic stuff, you can remove the meta links from the front page and other tweaks and now they have fully functioning site that you don't have to do much to. If you are hosting it, be prepared to apply security patches the instant they come out and backup the db.
I know all the php/wordpress snobs on
i) Frameworks are too complicated - but poster admits he is not a programmer (hence the framework difficulty) and unqualified to judge their complexity.
ii) Complains about things being too expensive to make (again, how is he making sites form scratch without being a programmer? I think he must at least have some coding skills, mor than he credits himself with)
The answer: Frameworks are there to reduce time to market; if he's refusing to use modern tools and frameworks, much is explained.
(I'm not suggesting frameworks are good in general; but a good framework is good in its niche; you want to put up a blog.. it takes 10 minutes using an existing blogging framework; you want to write it yourself, order of magnitude more time.)
So .. this is his problem, not a systemic problem?
-black
The technologies are changing quickly. You're going to have to man-up, and keep with the changing market, or else, pay the price. Custom coding websites is all but dead. If you can't build web-applications, you're screwed. Get with the times, or learn what the traditional-media advertising illustrators discovered the hard way.
Yeah, the time for coding them from scratch probably passed about 7-8 years ago. Can you still code them from scratch today? Yes, technically you can, but at most employers you would be way to slow on the productivity side. As a web developer and web hosting guy for a large Fortune 500 company, I can tell you that marketers expect to be able to get a very nice site with lots of bells and whistles up within just a few days anymore, with all kinds of custom features that allow them to edit the page without a developer. To meet that kind of demand, you can't code from scratch. You really need to use a CMS tool to handle the editing/admin functionality, and then some sort of RAD framework, whether it be .Net MVC, JQuery, AngularJS, etc (or multiple of these frameworks) to quickly set up the rest of your custom functionality. Otherwise they'll just go to someone else who can do it faster so that they can meet their ever shrinking time to market campaign goals.
This, by the way, is one of the reasons I'm no longer a developer. I personally enjoyed the nitty gritty of coding from scratch, and got bored quickly from just doing "information plumbing", where you pull from one or two databases, get to do a tiny bit of code but mostly the framework does everything interesting. I know lots of people prefer that because they don't want to deal with low level stuff, but that's not my bag.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
My advice is to become familiar with HTML/CSS/JS/PHP/MySQL or whatever and build your own stripped down frameworks, basic stuff like a CMS and frontend scaffolding. Then you can adapt that as need be, add bits on or take them away, change it while keeping costs down (since you've already built the basics) and maintain a minimal profile.
It's not that hard once you start laying the foundations.
I should add that I use squarespace and hate it. I do NOT recommend it. Only for the stupidest of folks is it appropriate. Dunno what that says about me that I'm into year two of my subscription...
Here's my website. I invite anybody to look at the source code, and compare it against your run-of-the-mill WordPress website.
Here are the 249 lines of Python code that I use to render it. In addition to the source code, there are x6 template files (each less than 1KB large), and x1 CSS file (less than 2KB).
What the parent post says, rings true to me.
No need for Django, no need for frameworks, no need for deployment systems beyond DropBox.
"The long term savings in terms of enabling staff to go in and edit stuff live has saved a fortune." -- This especially rings true to me.
"I tried Django and the sheer volume of stuff I needed to do to get the same functionality up was huge and then the staff couldn't edit it because for all that's claimed for Django, there's a big model you have to get in you head before you can start meddling with it, and that means web professionals who cost a lot of money." -- And this too. (And I'm a professional Django developer, by day.)
I heard recently that there are people working on an "Indie Web" concept; I'm all in favor.
Your problem is you've mixed design with the site HTML.
Developers are notoriously bad at design work. Being a developer, I can tell you that we are not usually great at the artsy aspects it takes to design good sites.
However, if you give us a design, we can transform it (using our preferred frameworks) into a working site.
Somewhere along the way you got the idea that you can do it all, but that's your problem. You can't (and shouldn't) be coding or generating all of the pages. If your expertise is design, then have at it. But after your design is done, hand it over to a developer for implementation.
Just as I don't want to see a developer designing, I don't want to see a designer developing.
If your page isn't fully loaded in less than 2 seconds over a real world network without using cache, potential clients have will leave before the 1st page load.
If you can write pages that load fast, keep doing the custom work. If your pages are slow, fix it or fix your technique.
...than one of those bloated, slow-loading, all-Flash restaurant front-ends that take 20 seconds to load and animate before they show you the location, hours of operation, or any menus.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Make your websites a PDF file. It will always look and print nicely without wasted time quibbling over screen size, browser compatibility, fonts, CMS security patches or complaints from clients who need your help changing x, y AND z by themselves for free.
The nice thing about PDF files creating them is just a click away for most WYSIWYG publishing systems and by withholding source document your clients will have no way of making any changes without paying you.
If you object to my response with reasonable arguments it may be better to consider a different approach better addressing your (customers) specific needs.
If all your client wants is a simple/stupid brochure site that they can maintain, just build it in Google Sites with a Google account they can own. You can do a whole site in 1-3 hours depending on how much custom graphics you have to build. You can reasonably charge $250-1000 depending on your time, and spend an hour training them on how to maintain it so you don't have to in perpetuity.
I've done this just a few times now (twice for free), and every time I'm glad I did. The more you dig into it, the more you realize it actually does allow for *some* customization. If you get into the scripting, you can do even more. I see tech-challenged people starting their small (1-20 people) brick & mortar businesses and being totally lost on things like document sharing, company email, web sites, cloud storage, etc. I just hook them up with the Google Business apps...$50/person/year. It's cheap and works.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
WordPress is the store-bought bread solution. Does what most people need, is advanced enough that most work can be done through the admin GUI, and plugins are easy enough to build that a fellow by-hand person can figure them out without too much difficulty.
The only caveat I'd put on using WordPress is that you need to treat updates like you would on Windows: make sure your WordPress core and plugins are always up to date. Its huge user-base means there's a lot more hackers running automated exploits that'll bog-down a web hosting server if you get compromised, and that might get your account suspended. On our shared hosting we're now recommending clients install WordPress via Installatron (a cPanel addon) and have it automatically patch everything by default.
Simpler sites, but more OS-level issues from going mainstream.
--- Need web hosting?
I can't think of a single thing I do or would want to do with a computer that doesn't have some sort of toolkit, library, framework, or other component out there to get a "leg up" on doing the work, unless you're only doing the most basic and simplistic pieces of code or presentation. In the case of HTML, that means a text document without images, video, or sound; never mind "active" components of the interface via JavaScript.
The hardest lesson to learn as a programmer is that "not invented here" is code for "I am too arrogant to use someone else's solution."
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Anyone else go through this?
Nope. Throwing faster hardware at a problem is much cheaper than having a team of developers spend weeks optimizing a framework or making a new one.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
Now I have a repertoire of modules I can use to put together a site for a given situation.
Twinstiq, game news
You wouldn't grow your own wheat, sugar cane, raise chickensc, etc for the ingredients for your choclate chip cookies. Just go buy the dough from the store.
That's quite a leap man. No I would not grow my own sugar cane, but store bought dough is disgusting compared to small effort to make your own cookies from ingredients you buy at a store...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Don't bother coding from scratch. Any client for whom money is an object, you're better off just hanging out and drinking beers with as you co-plan world domination. Eventually if you ask enough detailed product spec questions the client will realize they are in over their heads, get intimidated and abandon the project. They got off lucky. You got free beer.
Well sure. No one should ever invent anything without written permission from the Flying Spaghetti Monster, countersigned by Bill Gates, His Holiness the Pope and the ghost of Alan Turing. I mean everyone knows that!
Seriously, I quite agree with Dutch Gun's point that we all build on the work of others. I just think that blindly accepting third party solutions can be just as bad as blindly rejecting them. And if no-one ever reinvented the wheel, we'd probably still be coding in COBOL
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!