A buddy of mine is working a website and spending a lot time coding it. He does not see himself as geeky or tech-savvy. He also is creating content for it. Nothing is live yet, despite accumulating over two months worth of material. He’s stuck on engineering the site.
You can see the problem here. Its an issue of division of labor. You may get away with designing the site on the surface and doing content, but with his case (coding and writing), it’s eating a lot time. He has no time to focus on building a community.
Coding and content building is so Web 1.0. What I mean by that is before Web 2.0, you couldn’t simply upload content as easy or as fast as now. For instance, nobody I know uses iWeb from Apple. iWeb is beautiful in designing good looking websites, but its hard as hell to build content for it. God forbid you want to move your content to somewhere else.
Content Management Systems (CMS), like WordPress or Squarespace allow individuals to publish content readily and easily. You as an user don’t have to think about coding or design because its taken care of already. That basically means you focusing on writing rather than coding.
With that said:
The next generation of CMS will be Squarespace. The user interface contains mode switching instantly; from design, structure building, to content creation. Furthermore, Squarespace makes it easy to export and import from any CMS out there. That’s important. Lastly, the issue of web hosting is a dicey one. You would have to maintain your site like a network administration, to keep it up if you choose to get a web host. At least with Squarespace, they are a host and a CMS like WordPress, but on a scale.
Regarding the scale, if you have increase in traffic, your site won’t crash on Sqauarespace’s server architecture. They will automatically switch servers for fatter pipes to accommodate the increase traffic. Eventually you will need to upgrade if you got a ton of people coming in and out, but it’s servers can handle the influx of website hits.
The difference in choosing WordPress or Squarespace is pricing. WordPress if free, but sometimes limited. Their templates might not be enough, or widgets for that matter. Squarespace has scale starting at 8 bucks a month to 50 bucks a month, depending on your needs. There is a 14 day free trail with Squarespace, to kick the tires if you will.
Give yourself permission to do what you wanted to do all along: build content. Wear One Hat.
Fred 2:38 am on April 16, 2009 Permalink
Ya, Vimeo is a million times visually cleaner and the community has seemed to thus far avoid attracting the boring trolls. Awesomely, the first random video I clicked tonight was Aaron Nace http://vimeo.com/3965768. I’ve been a huge fan of his work on Flickr for a while so this was a nice surprise. Love this one too: http://vimeo.com/2303498.
Chico 9:35 pm on April 16, 2009 Permalink
Aaron Nace’s video how-to for photoshop are pretty good. Thanks for the resource, Fred.
In between, what has been your experience with Vimeo in terms of producing stuff on the web?