A website by Richard Feich

The Ridges Sanctuary in Door County, Wisconsin is one of my favorite places visit with Mother Nature.

The Good:

• Built with native ASP.NET V2.0,  C#, XML, and XSLT
• An excellent and well documented API 
• A highly customizable system built upon an open development platform
• An active developer network with a responsive online forum
• A beautiful Windows-like desktop delivered over the web to your browser…with ribbon menus, smooth gradations, dimensional icons, and right-click context menus. This fancy interface is used to build and manage the website and it’s content by both developers and business users.
• Handles multiple languages well
• Good cache control and excellent front-end performance
• Good support for Web Standards
• Highly granular security control
• Customizable workflow

The Bad:

• Poor plugin [modules] architecture. What modules are available, are typically painful to install, and almost impossible to uninstall; and further more, many of the modules are buggy and poorly implemented.
• Out-of-the-box, Sitecore provides almost no Website/CMS functionality. You’ll have to build everthing, templates, layouts, navigation element, etc. As I said in a previous post “Sitecore is not a CMS, it’s a framework to build a CMS”.
• The beautiful Windows-like desktop is massively heavy which requires a high bandwidth connection and powerful desktop equipment.
• The developer interface is anything but intuitive, it’s complex, confusing, and sometimes buggy. It has serious usability issues…it’s designed by geeks for geeks. I love the core architectual concepts of Sitecore (templates, masters, layouts, renderings, etc) and how websites are constructed using these concepts; however, building a website through this interface is frustrating to say the least. Fortunately, the business user interface can be customized and simplified to be more usable and somewhat intuative.
• Managing security on large websites can be painfully difficult for developers and insane for business users.

The Ugly:

• A massive footprint. An out-of-the-box install will consume 543 MB of disk space with 24,057 files and 587 folders; also the system requires 6 databases. After this massive install, hit the website with a browser only to be greeted with a single blank white web-page page with the black text “Sitecore Welcome to Sitecore”.
• The administration side of this system is extremely heavy for web delivery.  With beautiful graphics driven with Ajax, Sitecore gives the impression of  Windows desktop which leads you to expect certain level of behavior and performance which simply the system can not fully deliver.
• Creating and managing multiple independentwebsites is a complete nightmare with or without the multi-site manager. Forget it; it’s not worth the pain. In-spite of what the folks at Sitcore might say, Sitecore is NOT a very good multi-site system – I learned this the hard way.

Conclusion:

After evaluating dozens of systems available on the market, Sitecore does in fact standout as being one of the better systems for many reasons. However, this system does have its place in your tool belt and is certainly not recommended for all types of websites. Sitecore is best suited for a large corporate portals, or institution websites, etc. Larger scale projects with many authors and editors requiring workflow. Sitecore can work well for multiple relatedwebsites which can share management function, templates, layouts, security, etc. I personal would not recommend Sitecore for small business brochureware websites or anything small scale, where simplicity is an important factor…Sitecore might work; but its a huge overkill.

Sitecore [out-of-the-box] is not as much a CMS, as it is a framework for building a CMS.

I am currently involved with a Sitecore CMS/website development, and I have a lot to say about this complex system, as well as about my development experience with this system. The topic of many future posts…stay tuned.

I updated my Wordpress installation and template to allow rotating or random imagery in the header block (above)–for now it’s set to random. If you reload this page you may see a new image in the header.  I say may because random does not necessarily mean different, since there are a fixed number of images in the header gallery, the same image could very possibly be reloaded sequentially.  Over time I’ll add and remove images from that gallery…just to keep things fresh. Maybe, I’ll throw-in some seasonal things as well. All of the photographs used are my own, and are copyright protected.

Here’s a shot I took atop of the John Hancock Building back in 2001 while enjoying a glass of fine champagne…it’s a good memory.

In a previous post I discussed the concept of what constitutes the “Ideal Web Team” in terms of people/talent. In this post I’ll discuss one key position on the team: The Web Designer/Developer. This person has the skills and creative temperament of a Graphic Artist with technical know-how of a Web Developer, thus a hybrid. A web team that does not have this kind of talent will suffer with lower productivity and dull websites. Some hardcore back-end developers are talented designers as well; but it’s very difficult to be highly productive in both areas, especially on the same project. Typically, back-end developers don’t have the required creative edge or proficiancy with graphic design tools. A hybrid web designer/developer should generally have the following characteristics:

• Expertise with professional tools of the trade, tools  like Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, etc.
• Good understanding typography and page layout with a very keen sense of design.
• Branding and marketing experience.
• Web standards advocate
• Expetise with XHTML , JavaScript, Ajax, CSS, especial  CSS driven layouts
• In depth understanding of the principles of Accessibility and Usability
• An Information Architecture guru
• Significant ability with Flash and Action Script
• Can design a Logo Design, if needed
• Capable of print media design.

Some companies discount the importance of Web Designers or Hybrid Designer/Developers; I’m willing bet the quality of the websites produced by these companies will reflect this attitude. The web is a visual interactive media which requires very special talent to build excellent and interesting user interfaces. Sure just about anyone can build a web page, it’s not that hard; but it takes true talent, understanding, and years of experience to do it right…to be a cut above the rest.

Building a Website is like playing guitar, anyone can learn to strum a tune; but it takes native talent and years of dedicated study to master the instrument.

I love Google Maps, especially the satellite imagery. The other day I was exploring the world and I noticed that they updated the imagery of my home turf…the place where I grew up as a kid. As I looked at the house where my folks still live and studied the surrounding area, I couldn’t help but to reminisce about all of the time we spent fishing, hunting, and exploring. I loved having a lake and nature just outside our back door.

A remnant of the old Illinois Central train yard and still in use. Looking north from the Jaskson overpass. In the background is the Art Institute of Chicago (it’s backside). 

Chicago Train Yard

Here’s a shot I took back in 2000 [which seems like decades ago], from a slightly different perspective.

I came across an interesting blog posting by Andy Budd where he describes the Ideal Web Team. I agree with him for the most part; but what I find most interesting about this post is the comments in response too it. It’s clear that different businesses have a different market niche targeted toward different clientèle; and as a result have a slightly different team composition.

Here is my ideal small high performance web team:

1. Account/Project Manager (1)
   - May also wear the hat of a Sales and Marketing person
   - Primary point of contact with the client
   - Negotiates deliveries
2. Creative Director (1)
    - Usability and Information Architecture expert
    - Responsble for the user experience
    - Provides project vision and creative direction
    - Brand development
    - Web Marketing Specialist and SEO expert
3. Designer/Developer Hybrid (1)
    - Web
             Graphic Design
              XHTML
              CSS
             Accessibility 
             Web Standards
    - Print
    - Flash
4. Web Developer (2)
    - ASP.NET (c#, MSSQL)
    - LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl, Python)
    - Experienced with database concepts and design
    - Web Standards
5. Content Producer (1)
    - writer/editor
    - Wears other hats
    - With possible expertise in AI, Usability, and Accessibility

This list is not set in concrete for me; but it roughly covers what I believe are the talents required to have a high performance web development team; and sure other people are needed to run the business from the top to the bottom…but for this post I’m talking web development.

As we work through the dog days of summer, I can’t help but think about Fall and a place I love to visit.

Door County, Wisconsin