‘I remember back in my day you used to have to know something in order to be a plumber. These days any joker with a hack saw, some PVC pipe and some glue can claim they’re a plumber…’

I’ve heard web designers with similar laments about modern CMS packages and how easy they make it for the average Joe to create a site.

@Dee
Don’t give up hope. I couldn’t add a comment here using Firefox, one of my plugins probably clashing with the new design. I had to [gasp] open up IE to post this comment. All is not lost, but web designers are going to need to be flexible. Might be time to venture into template design…

What a great post! In my humble opinion, most templates for blogs are free, easy to set up, and require less maintenance than a professionally designed website.

I’ve noticed that a lot of bloggers tend to treat their blogs merely as online journals instead of utilizing their blogs as a global marketing tool to promote their goods and services.

For emerging writers, a well written blog, “content management system,” containing provocative content is an extremely effective, cost efficient way to market books internationally.

Yes, I’m a first-time visitor. Thank you for sharing.

Manchild

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I agree that a blog is just a website, but I think that blogging has really pushed the technology.

About 10 years ago, I started working with CMS systems (they were simply called “dynamic websites” back then). The idea was simple: store all of the information in a database, and then set up an easy way for people to change that information. So rather than use a big HTML editor like Dreamweaver to fix “misspeled”, the average office worker could log onto the website and change it using an online Word-like word processor.

It took a while for the technology to come along for various reasons. But like the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention. Once blogging started to take off and people wanted to publish themselves online, there was a greater, more immediate need for a self-contained, almost-dummy-proof way of creating that publisher.

Now with WordPress and other similar systems, you can plug in lots of cool stuff like automatic backups and basic email campaign software and whatever else. Quite amazing to see the arc.

Me personally — I prefer to blend the two. Right now I am still redesigning my main website, but essentially what I’ve done is create a design for my “main” website, and then altered the WordPress default theme (changing graphics, adjusting the CSS, etc.) so that it (almost) seamlessly matches my website.

But I can see the allure to a full WordPress website — it really is an easy-to-use CMS. There are some problems with scalability once you get into the bigger websites, but for the average small business owner I think that the usability and freedom of controlling your own content is the biggest plus.

And for web designers — well it really does open some interesting possibilities, doesn’t it…?!

~Graham