templatedata

On Friday I finished up at the University. After ten years at Sydney in a wide variety of roles, it's time for something new. This time it's not a sabbatical, it's the real deal. So, I thought I would say thank you to all those who have read Templatedata over the years and good luck with your web endeavours in the future. I am handing the reins of Templatedata over to the more-than-capable hands of two of my colleagues. I'm sure they'll be here soon with some meaty posts.

Au revoir.

They're all the same apparently.

So what I see happen over and over again these days is that some energetic and enthusiastic (though over time, increasingly less so) individuals start tackling the problems. And yes, these problems are the same ones, to the point where it becomes possible to identify three stages of development:

* First stage: building a plethora of websites;
* Second stage: trying to re-organize those into the same style, on the same server, using the same CMS -- but often, multiple instances of such a CMS, because there's no central authority to force everyone to organize the content, and everyone wants their own sandbox;
* Third stage: reorganizing those multiple websites into one CMS, with centralized control -- or at least, the opportunity to see what's happening -- and centralized landing pages for target audiences or subject channels.

As each of these stages can take anything from 5 to 10 years, and most will still be at the end of the first, one can only guess how long many of them will take to accomplish renovation. And it certainly doesn't help that most of the people struggling to make a change are working in a vacuum (from more than one perspective). It induces them to re-invent the wheel and, at the same time, making the mistakes others have made before.

Yes, I would say that's pretty accurate. It's Adriaan Bloem.