in my former job, i developed the Belgian, Netherland and French sites of TEFAL, Rowenta and other kitchen & housewive furniture. At least I thought i would really "design" their sites but no.. it was my first experience with CMS.
Cough! Excuse me : Microsoft CMS.
Managing channels, updating channels, deleting channels -> managing POSTs, deleting POSTs, managing POSTs and flaming the staff in France because they accidentally deleted a channel or a POST and being flamed by people in Indonesia because I accidentally modified a channel and updated the prise of a cooking pan to the double of its currency in Canadian dollars instead of the exact prize in Suiss francs without the ecology taxes, you got the picture ?
Mayhem.
All that was in `live', 24/24 hrs, 7 days a week and their main sever was called .. "Euthopia" !
Ok, the job was more than well payed but it had nothing do do anymore with real plain old Webdesign/developing, nothing.
Lately, i was rethinking about how at angelfire/Lycos/Tripod they still earn lots of money by hosting webspace for free. Those guys do it still the good old hard way, that is : no CMS but :
-an FTP account
-ugly templates for complete noobs
- easily modifiable pages for advanced HTMLers, CSS guys and JavaScripters.
[/boring part ]
Excactly how I planned to do my business with some [secret] advantages (living in Belgium gives you Internet privileges : nobody takes you seriously, so nobody ever checks if your users hosts PIRATED SOFTWARE or PIRATED MUSIC, hehehe).
So, i thought that setting up a server, an FTP server and some prise-related issues for MysQL and PHP. All the rest,static HTML is 50megs absolutely free.
All that would give me at least some monthly income for my older days.
But no..no.. no...
I checked the raging success that CMS widgets has now on the hosting market and it is f*cking horrible !! They all offer it !
That means that in the close future (American citizens: read 'Now'..), nobody will need Webdevelpers anymore since all domain registrants will have a fully customisable GUI where they have to click on Bold,Italics,Underlined, color, table etc.. Like in Word, to manage their entire website !
1) So far, so good. Skilled webdevelopers will be hired by companies who make CMS software off course ! (and those people can be counted one one hand), all the others that want to earn some money by hosting, well, they'll just have to die, disapear and belong to the past.
Soon we will all read "FTP ?? Isn't that something 'old and dangerous ??", yup, yup, yup...
2) After a while, all websites will look the same.
Well in fact, all comercial websites have always shared or disputed a certain style, you will all remember the famous JavaScript watermark, no ?, the first animated GIF's, no?, the disapearing of frames once server-side coding broke in, remember ?, those ugly bean shaped or standard gray click buttons now replaced by fancy looking CSS shaped click areas, no ?, the fonts that goes smaller and smaler by the years as if what you have to read is explicit pure nonsense, no ?, the appearance of Flash on the scene,?,
Do you all have read what Jacob Nielsen (self proclaimed webdesign-guru) thinks about it all ?
He was right : they wil all f*ck it up : the screens of the surfer's will sson look like a giant commercial and garbage collector of RSS from here, unreadable paragraphs there, nonsense everywhere and especially security leaks will be the same all over the Net, because, in order to run a CMS properly : cliient-side script has to run & flow..
We will be back in the old days, if we resume, when pages where black text on gray background.
3) The future of Webdesign/Webdevelop will be on the programmers level and the hardcore network-specialists : hours and hours and hours of tracking down spurious submission of FORMs, POSTDATA, GETDATA, database-changes, you name it.
Because a lawyer that 'clicks' furiously on his proposed CMS doesn't care about a server error 501, a 404, he justs goes on clicking like frustrated dactylos and typists when working with Word, Excell etc..
4) Graphic designers : go home, change your goals and aim for 3D animations in order to get a job at PIXAR's, no hosting company needs you anymore since everybody will like to work with those 'cute, fancy & trendy' templates'. Some CMS-infested companies just offer you their tainted logos on which you paste yours and if you don't agree, they'll tell you the format is not good or the size id too large.
5) All that astonishes me, I browse less and less, i avoid gOooogle like black death, they are the next monopole for sure, they'll soon offer you "Google-Pizza-Delivery", just wait.
In the meantime, internet will be like back in the old days, from link to link, knowing which place you exactly want to be, bypassing all the mass-media bulsh*t information.
The European Internet has now reached what AOL is in the US.
Let's all start using TEXT-BROWSERS !!
)))--FrankB
n00b of yet another nOOb.
?
, ill do some more digging.