Blogs, CMS and website templates: Major Changes in the world of web design.
The web design world is going through major changes, changes I think many web designers are just not aware of.
It comes down to 3 things:
- Blogs/CMS software: these are turn-key template driven web sites. This is not just a visual component – Blogs/CMS systems have built-in functionality (’engines’) that makes maintaining a website trivial.
- Web site templates: purely a design template, whereas Blogs and CMS offer both visual and functional aspects.
- Pod Casting: the emergence of audio and soon video content on the web at levels never seen before.
These three developments I believe are changing the face of web design, in a way that we have not seen since the first web design software came out years ago.
The days of building websites from scratch will soon fade, and become something very specialized – there are just too many advantages in using a CMS/Blog or a website template.
THE POINT:
As a web designer, you should jump at this opportunity – begin to learn about how you can use web templates and Blogs/CMS to build your own killer websites faster than ever before.
April 14th, 2006 at 7:49 am
I agree with the above statements, but I don’t think custom designs will dwindle as much as it was implied. Here’s why.
– Template driven sites are nice at first, but when you want to expand your site and do something unique it is very tough to do so. I’ve gotten customers because their cheap templates weren’t able to fully realize their needs.
– Although template sites may look nice they don’t often reflect the branding and personality of a company. Each company is unique and in order to have a branded site you need custom design.
– Template sites are really not as cheap as they seem. Someone still needs to gather and write all of the content, which to me is the most time consuming part of the process. Working with a professional web designer will save time and thus money in the long run.
~Tim
August 10th, 2006 at 12:25 pm
It\’s all about CMS. The good old pure html day are gone forever
August 31st, 2006 at 6:37 pm
BLOG:CMS is probably the only system that is not only w3c valid, but also ships with application/xhtml+xml MIME type by default, for top performance on modern browsers like Mozilla, Firefox, Safari and Opera. But BLOG:CMS will also automatically supply older standard, text/html, to browsers which cannot handle this, like obsolete Microsoft Internet Explorer.
September 1st, 2006 at 2:14 am
When I think about CMS programming and good old HTML, I see a huge difference. The same difference that\’s between growing your own food and buying it from the supermarket, sure it\’s more efficient, but you never get the same satisfaction.
May 11th, 2008 at 6:43 pm
Yes, there are indeed big changes in our web design world to which we must adapt. Although it can be a bit overwhelming to try to keep abreast of all the possibilities, it seems that the added choice now allows for designers to create unique solutions based on the individual needs of each project. I don’t really see that one system (e.g. CMSs) or another will dominate, rather, over the long run, I think designers will become more discerning about which method they use based on the specific needs of their clients. It’s interesting to watch the progression of our field over time.
Cheers,
Holly