The disappearing developer? Software like Big Medium means that web developers can move on to new horizons.
Photo by
Aaron Michael Brown.
Remember the webmaster? The hero of the mid-1990s? The webmaster was the one guy or gal in the office to know enough HTML to update the fax number on your site’s contact page. The modern content management system (CMS) has pretty much eliminated the need for a webmaster. Rejoice! Now everyone in the office knows how to update the fax number.
Until recently, though, you still needed the webmaster’s brighter cousin, the web developer, to get your website up and running in the first place. The developer helped you to install and configure the content manager, to keep it humming along, to piece together its features for your own site. And alas, the process typically cost more time and money than anyone expected, the developer included.
I think this web developer role is next up to follow the webmaster into obscurity, at least for the most common website categories: marketing sites, news sites, online magazines. Software like Big Medium makes the custom software developer unnecessary for all but the biggest and most ambitious of those organizations.
My hope is that Big Medium makes it as easy to create commercial content sites as blogging software has made it to create personal journals. (Several customers have already told me that they found it easier to install Big Medium 2 than it was to set up Wordpress and other blog software; that’s high praise.)
Big Medium is a content management system for mere mortals.
Unlike most CMS systems, Big Medium is aimed squarely at web designers and their clients -- not developers or CMS ninjas. It’s a content management system for mere mortals. No programming fu required. It’s easy to install and runs in just about any hosting environment.
Big Medium is basically a pre-configured CMS that is tuned to deliver the most common features for the most common types of content sites. It doesn’t try to solve every problem or create every type of site. Indeed, it has an implicit point of view on what a content site should be, and it provides the associated tools in a way that designers can blend directly into their HTML.
If you’re a web designer, I think you’ll love it. It’s actually fun to use. Rather than enforcing a cookie-cutter layout, it bends gracefully to your design vision.
When the designer, or even the content editor, can install and configure their own CMS with all of the features they need, the web developer as middle man is just plain redundant. For a broad category of sites, Big Medium solves the pain of content management, no coding needed.
The web developer and the wheel
I’m not suggesting that the web developer is extinct. Hardly. As a web developer myself, this is an exciting time with an onslaught of new developments. The field is bursting with possibilities -- so many, in fact, that we developers shouldn’t waste our time reinventing the wheel.
The common content site is no longer a challenging software problem. The basic feature set has been solved. It wastes developers’ energies (and their clients’ money) to tap powerful CMS platforms to assemble these features from scratch every time.
See, most CMS’s are not themselves finished software in the way that most consumers understand software. A CMS is typically a platform that’s intended to be used to build other software, a set of building blocks that programmers can piece together to build something for regular folks to use. These powerful general-purpose systems are terrific -- amazing really. But they’re typically intended for developers, not for web designers and certainly not for content editors.
Big Medium takes the system higher up the stack, providing a CMS that is already pieced together into a polished, packaged application that’s easy to use and appropriate for typical content sites.
All that remains is for web designers to apply their magic, and for writers and editors to supply the main ingredients. Web developers and heavy-duty CMS platforms can in the meantime be deployed to new challenges. It’s good news all around.
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Congrats on getting this massive work accomplished Josh!
Extra pastry and fine wine this week to celebrate, I hope.
Best regards from 'kinda sunny Malta' :-)
sims
I agree with you to a certain extent but as a web developer/graphic designer... there's more to the trade than just using a CMS. Especially if want PROFESSIONAL RESULTS.
I'm always offended by the person who picks up Microsoft Publisher and now because they can mix fonts and photos, call themselves graphic designers. There's a hell of a lot more to being a designer than that.
By the same token, being able to use a CMS will not make you a "web developer" as there is A LOT more to it than that.
There will also be businesses satisfied with shoddy (cheap) workmanship. I see a ton of flyers, brochures, websites and the like that look like they were throw together by someone's nephew, but for businesses whose professional image is everything... there will always be room for web developers and designers.
Thanks for your reply. I don't mean to suggest that either designers or web developers are unneeded, only that the challenges for web developers no longer lie in traditional companies with traditional content sites (e.g., marketing, news and magazine sites).
In fact, designers are needed more than ever; I don't see technology abstracting away their role anytime soon. As you said, the taste and skill of design professionals cannot be replaced by a WYSIWYG HTML editor. I agree with you completely here: Sites powered by software like Big Medium get the best results when set up by a talented designer.
Web developers, however, are a different case. I certainly don't suggest that a CMS can transform anyone (poof!) into a web developer. But for most sites, packaged software has evolved to the point where it provides, with elegance and efficiency, 99 percent of the polished features and interfaces that most content sites need and want. You can indeed get professional results with this class of software.
Developers are best deployed (and, in my opinion, happiest) when there's innovation to be done. For most content sites, there just aren't many new problems to solve. Yet developers are called upon again and again to reinvent the wheel, building web features that existing software already provides, usually better and certainly cheaper than the homebrew solution. They're solving problems that no longer need solving.
It's time for them to discover new challenges. Asking web developers to continue making homebrew systems for content sites wastes their skills and organizations' resources. Developers should chase innovation rather than duplicating what's already available. That's good for organizations, and good for developers, too.
As I alluded in the original post, there are exceptions: Ambitious and innovative companies will want and need to continue to push the envelope, to discover new ways to present, find and mix their content. (In the media realm, for example, I'm thinking of sites like the NY Times, The Guardian, the BBC.) When you're trying to create something truly new, it makes sense to have web developers on staff. Likewise, there are occasions when packaged software doesn't fit a company's business model, and custom code is required.
That said, most organizations are not trying to create something new on the web and don't particularly want to. They simply want their marketing site or their news site to work, to look professional, to have the expected features, and that's it. That's fine, and that's where off-the-shelf software fits perfectly, no coding required.
Happy holidays!
Josh
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