Thought Process : Process Thoughts

Why content management software hasn’t worked: March 03, 2003 issue of New Thinking by Gerry McGovern

Content management software hasn’t worked because it was badly designed and massively over-hyped. Software companies lied about their products, charging criminal prices for crap software. It hasn’t worked because organizations didn’t understand content. They wanted a quick fix. They issued specifications that bore little relation to what they actually needed.

SIGIA-L Mail Archives – February 2003

Worthwhile thread named:
“Study: Content Management Tools Fail”
with varrying viewpoints on how CMS has evolved, failed to deliver on it’s promise and why.

A Blog network analysis attempt
Unfortunately, they’re using Standard Meta Tags and Dublin Core association instead of RDF semantics, but maybe thet will change. A noble effort none the less!
Blizg – The Blog Resource

Here we combine a module holding the banner with another which hold our global navigation. This gives us a couple things: 1) the ability to use them together so your templates look clean and neat, and 2) by keeping the components separated, the ability to use them separately, say if you just want the banner with no navigation in a transactional area.

It starts with the “header” area. On my site that area’s the same throughout, so there’s no reason to not have it in one generalized place. We’ll then include that in all of our templates which need it, and then when we edit it in one place the whole site will reflect the change.

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MovableType ships whith a series of tempaltes which do it’s bidding. What’s kind of silly about them, is that they are templates in that they are the basis for rendering your site, but they are not very abstract… that is, there is a lot of repitition.

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Crystal Blue Persuasion

The IA list has been all a-buzz with views and links surrounding “Persuasive Architecture/Navigation/Writing”, which I thought I’d summarize here.

The concept is pretty easy. It’s been used by advertisers, non profits, P.R. firms and any others who care enough about getting their message out to make their text, layout and design compelling enough to get the reader off the couch to “dial that phone number”, “sign that petition”, “send in that contribution” or whatever. At it’s core is telling people what you offer and framing it in a way that’s meaningful to them so they experience a desire to act.

Pretty funny, really. I’ve been espousing that if Web sites and such don’t meet the business goals, then it doesn’t matter if it meets the users goals, because that site isn’t going to last long for some time. It’s for this very reason that I started distributing my Site Goals Workbook free of charge and publishing the Better Sites newsletter (e-zine) to try to give tips on merging these two goal sets.

• Captology which is listed first due to my penchant for scholarly treatments of a subject
• “Influence: the Psychology of persuasion” by Robert Cialdini is a classic text on how this stuff gets driven by the human psyche
• Persuasive Navigation by: Jeff Lash Which has some marvelously practicle substance to it
• Business-centred design by: Henrik Olsen which somewhat summarizes the next 3 and then some
• How to Get Your Visitors to Take Action
• The Payoff of Planning Persuasive Architecture
• Qualified Answers to Persuasive Architecture

Browser Dis-function database
Sitesleuth Home Page

Mouse Gesture plug-in and extensible API
StrokeIt – Mouse Gestures for Windows

Nifty

Pretty patterns revisited

While reading a post by James Hobart of Classic System Solutions titled Implementing Visual Design Patterns or “VDPs”, my interest in design patterns was rekindled, so I began poking around and reading once again.

Hobarts article had the benefit of giving history, current usage and a brief example of implementation which put it above most other similar articles. Granted, he has more to gain as his article was a trailer for his retail product “GuiGuide”. A good article non the less.

I bounced some e-mails back and forth with my Father who has seen similar things used to analyse social discourse over the years and he found some interestin greferances and shared reflections with me:

I have a suspicion that pattern things is an academic kind of exploration of an aspect of something called SYSTEMS THINKING THINGS which used to be called systems theory (among many other labels) until it was discovered that there is, really, not a system theory. In science as we know it and use it and do it, a theory has to be testable by the systematic aggregation of data, or its not a theory.

I suspect that thinking about systems is helpful to countless people who earn a living in criticism, technology, science, and math; and that thinking about patterns helps them to think about systems ideas. I believe that to recognize that there is a difference between something that is a system and something that is not a system, is a good idea. The same for patterns.

Good things to think about– now and then. For most of us, not directly helpful except to recognize that there is probably a better way to do whatever we are doing.

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–h

Some of the links we looked at are here:

• Victor Lombardis 2 page PDF intro. A good place to start
• IA Wiki’s Patter Page
• Ericksons page
• http://hillside.net/patterns/
• A set ofinteraction design patterns
• And of course, Tidwell’s new effort
• Which is the new version of Tidwell’s earlier work