Marilyn Langfeld wrote:
I've been meaning to chime in with my experience, so here goes:
My team and I have just (almost) finished up a rather large site (
http://www.naifa.org ) using Web standards, with the client using
Dreamweaver and Contribute to add new pages and edit content. Most of
the site is hidden from non-members. The site has several hundred pages.
When we made our proposal, the very first thing the prospective
client said was, "I hope you're not going to try to sell us on your
content management system, like everyone else has." I said, "No, we
thought that Dreamweaver with Contribute would meet your needs." We
got the job.
The client is familiar with Dreamweaver. She wanted a way for her
coworkers to be able to create simple pages. They do this in
Contribute. She adds anything fancy in Dreamweaver. We set up css
classes for floats, tabular material, etc. The combination of
Contribute for simple text pages and Dreamweaver for anything else
(controlled by css classes) seems to be working well, although we've
been having some problems with the configuration of Contribute on
their system.
The only problem I see with this is that they can (and probably will)
drift from strict Web standards, unless my client really works hard
to keep the site going, since Contribute does allow you to use non
standards-based markup. In addition, while it's possible to show the
classes we've created in Drreamweaver, my client has to remember to
pull them into each page, which may not happen as time goes on.
The benefit of Dreamweaver and Contribute is flexibility. No it's not
a cms, but that's sometimes a benefit.
Best regards,
Marilyn Langfeld
Yes, I think a lot of people want to be able to interface with their
content in ways that are basically easy for them. But, for a company
based on Finance and Insurance, you would think that the process of
having a proper log of auditable workflow, which a proper CMS does, was
a very important component of managing their web presence.
The other problem is, your site (http://www.naifa.org/), after a quick
look has already degraded. To me, this just proves the point of the
problem. Macromedia should be able to clean their code up, but they
don't. Sure they have a market for the majority of quirksmode
developers, but there should be a set of tools that kick in for
standards based developers. DW should have this considering it place in
the market.
-------------------
Geoff Deering
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