I was talking with a couple of friends who work in the design field yesterday and we started discussing the current trends in HTML/CSS, web design, and more. Soon into the conversation they both began lauding high praise on Joomla, something I had heard about in the past but was still largely ignorant about.
The way they spoke about it began to worry me. Basically, they made it sound like an application that practically anyone could use to build a professional looking website, including someone with almost no knowledge of web development and scripting. They also said it was highly interoperable with all of the most frequently used plug-ins on the web: RSS, blogs, wikis, and more. Plus, it’s highly optimized for search engines! In order to use it, all you to have is a familiarity with the old drag-and-drop system for laying out stuff in a Word document.
The more they described Joomla the more I began to grow worried, and for obvious reasons: could I be learning all of this scripting at Ai for nothing? If anyone can have the power to build an extremely functional, professional looking site, what of my future job opportunities as a web designer?
Since that conversation I have done more reading about it, and am I’m still not totally convinced that this isn’t something to be alarmed about. Joomla is an open-source (free!) application that is defined as a Content Management System (CMS). These types of applications allow users to manage high amounts of information in an organized, straightforward fashion, and to make updating that information very easy. You’ve already had exposure to a CMS-based system with WordPress, an application that gives you templates and easy interfaces to add content, and then poof, you have a website.
The Joomla website compares itself to a “librarian” that tracks every bit of content on your website. It seems like it makes building web pages as simple as moving stuff around in a Word document. From the examples on their site, the websites produced by Joomla don’t look like amateur stuff either.
But the picture remains murky. I gather that CMS systems are really good for sites that need constant updating, but that’s not very reassuring: how many sites these days remain very static anyways? I got a couple of article that listed other pro/cons of using programs like Joomla (and there are lots, though it seems like it is currently the most popular) but the disadvantages were never thoroughly explained.
The most obvious negative I could think of was that using standardized templates would restrict your ability to create original web site designs, but I’m pretty sure that you have the ability to add your own templates into Joomla and it will take it from there. I’m still not convinced you actually need a great amount of expertise to even build these original templates within Joomla itself. So what then – should I save the several K I’m dropping on scripting and programming classes and just learn Joomla or another CMS option instead?
I’m definitely taking this to Wayne, and if any of you know the answer than please comment. I’ve attached articles for reference, the first one from About.com gives me the chills.
September 5, 2008 at 7:45 pm |
It’s funny that my article “gives you chills” it gave me chills to write it – and at the time, I was working on building exactly the system I described in the article.
Ironically, what ended up happening was that the PR folks building the press releases didn’t want to have to learn anything newer than how to save a Word document, and so the CMS ultimately didn’t work as well as it was envisioned.
I do think that most major commercial sites will be run by CMS before too long, but I also think that there will always be a market for people who can manipulate the CMS and create the templates (ie build the HTML) that the CMS uses to generate the pages.
If you’re interested in scripting and HTML etc. then I’d learn it. A CMS can’t build the HTML for you – you need a designer/coder for that. The CMS just takes the designs that you’ve built and makes them usable by people who don’t know HTML and JavaScript.
September 5, 2008 at 9:00 pm |
First of all, your friends are wrong. A CMS tool don’t leave the creation, brilliant minds and wonderful ideas in the sidewalk. The real scenario is: CMS tools need the design people like cars need mechanicals. Two sides of the same thing.
We work only with CMS tools and we have a lot of designers and “HTML’ers” working with us. Developers? Just 2 or 3, no more. Joomla, Drupal, Mambo, etc, give the power to designer and don’t take off their jobs.
Don’t worry, we need them
Best
September 11, 2008 at 4:29 pm |
We talked some in class, but I felt that your carefully stated questions needed more specific answers. The two folks above gave you a good honest view from a real world work perspective.
I’ll start with your initial concern: “If anyone can have the power to build an extremely functional, professional looking site, what of my future job opportunities as a web designer?”
Basically there are many levels of “web designer”. People have been producing what I will call “non-professional” web sites since the web began a few years ago. Everything from Word designed pages to simply copying the many templates available and dumping content in. But take a look at some professional web designers such as Andy Budd, Andy Clarke, Jeffery Zeldman, Dan Cedarholm, Roger Johansen, and many others I could provide you. These guys function at a much higher plain, and they do more than dump web designs out – they work with clients and users at a level that most of us only think about – getting at the core of what needs to happen to make a site truly user friendly and useful to the user. Some of them may even use a CMS occasionally to speed up production. But they understand the core coding extensively.
You can find jobs dumping content into CMS systems, as well as those that challenge you to design a web site expertly – yet use a CMS to accomplish it. Your design and ability to understand and apply user centered principles is what makes the difference.
Bye the way, their is a slight pay difference from the production “designer” and the one who is creating from scratch with knowledge of the industry, the user, and how to make a quality, semantic website that works. It depends on you which path you want to take.
CMS’s have been around for years, so have JavaScript libraries, CSS frameworks, etc. All represent talented people bottling their skills and making the products available – often for free. In general, a CMS requires someone who understands the backend of the system, most are not that simple. With some strong knowledge of HTML/CSS/PHP you can’t manipulate everything about them. If you have strong HTML/CSS/PHP skills, you may find a CMS that allows you to save time by beginning with their framework, and applying your design skills and technical experience to manipulate the CMS faster than building a highly functional site with backend programming.
But the key to what this is all about is that designing websites is not just a matter of cranking out code. As I mentioned before, it is the experience and understanding of the medium you are working with that makes the difference between a well respected designer and a production role. Design is about being mainly concerned with what the user needs are and how to integrate that with the best techniques and well-formed semantic code. It is about experiencing the current context – today the social web and Web 2.0 – and whatever tomorrow brings. The Fundamentals course was not about busy work with a lot of applications and processes – it was immersing you in the actual experience of what people do on the Web.
I really don’t want to defend AI and the money you are spending. I fully believe that each learner can grow and gain vital skill development if they choose to. Some are content to get a degree and be in the industry as production level roleplayers. Some choose to drive the web and become leading edge developers who can manage the entire process of developing a highly useful, fully semantic web application. The core processes are available to you here – but its your choice as to how you will use them.