Is the five page static website dead?
In days gone by, the five-pager was the mainstay of the web design business - Home, About us, Services, Testimonials, and Contact us. Like an online brochure, it provided small businesses with an online presence, and it provided their customers with the bare minimum of interaction.
At work, we recently took the decision that we weren’t going to do them any more. Just about every customer wants to manage their own content - which is their right - as a bare minimum. Many want blogs, feeds, fora, interactive maps, and other widgets.
The good news is that there are many pieces of open source software that make such requests simple, even trivial. Wordpress divides opinion as a CMS, but I’ve found that with plugins like cforms and this sitemap generator make development speedy and simple.
Most CMS worth their salt produce valid (x)html, so there’s really no reason not to offer the customer these functionalities any more - join me in ditching the five pager as a dinosaur from the past!
June 23rd, 2008 at 8:52 pm
Hi. How much of the web design you do is based on remembering and hand-typing CSS / PHP and how much is done using visual editing, cut/paste from a file of your favorite saved codes and then tweaking them?
I use CSS, but I have a collection of my commonly used CSS and can cut/paste it in to pages and later tweak them. I use Dreamweaver mostly. I’m wondering what would qualify me to say I can use CSS on a CV.
Thanks for your help.
June 24th, 2008 at 6:47 am
Hi Matt, thanks for the comment!
I would say that as long as you have a good understanding of the CSS you’re using, it doesn’t matter if you have a code ‘library’ as it were. If it speeds up development, and it is appropriate to use it, go for it!
I would encourage everyone learning web design / development to hand code as much as possible rather than use a WYSIWIG editor though - that’s the way to really gain an understanding of what you’re doing.
Cheers, John