It has been some time since I last created a web site. My days of supporting play by mail games and their web sites go back over 15 years. I always found that HTML was fun to work in, but it was not for just anyone. The new tools available today make things much easier. Although I do have a facebook account, I really have not put much effort into designing my wall or controlling the layout. I use it to communicate. The other webpage that I currently maintain is a family tree site on Ancestry.com. I like the site and the tools, but the application is very specialized. My one big complaint is that the tools are changed and moved around the screen. It frustrates users to know end to find a tool missing or moved that we have been using for a year or more.
My experiences this week made me realize just how far the computer industry has come. Web pages used to be something only programmers and engineers developed. With tools like Google and Yola, anyone can create web pages. Not necessarily good ones, but usable pages. The advantage of these new pages is more than just making design more accessible. It also gives the people using the pages the opportunity to name or label their information with names that are meaningful to them. I can remember the many fights with my own engineering teams to get them to go out and learn the customers language and to use that language in our code. Now the customer doesn't need us or our nonsense variable names. Maybe thats not such a bad thing.
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Hi Larry,
ReplyDeleteI'm glad that you brought up the moving around of tools. Honestly, I forgot that this is something that really annoys me! Facebook does this from time to time, though in all fairness, they give warning. Yahoo is, in my opinion, the worst offender of this. I wish that they would give me the option to not have them change things around. Before I got my computer fixed, it was really slow. When yahoo added chat to my inbox, it just about froze up my computer to try and check that e-mail account!
"I can remember the many fights with my own engineering teams to get them to go out and learn the customers language and to use that language in our code."
This seems to make perfect sense, I wonder why it was such a fight? I think that if I were a serious business trying to have a professional page, I would still seek out the assistance of professional developers, but for the average person or small business, the free sites are just fine.
Have a great day,
Katie May
You remind me of my husband, Larry. He trained as a computer tech back in the Vietnam War era. He was Mr. Computer geek barely out of high school, but then he left it behind him for almost 30 years. He's agog at how easy it is to do all the things that only HE could do way back when. Plus, he's had to learn a whole new way to approach technology, nothing remains the same, but that's true in all walks of life, eh?
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