[svlug] questions on web site development

[Scott DuBois]

On 11/30/2014 11:30 AM, Vincent Flesouras wrote:
> Hi Scott,
> I am a Drupal developer.

Yes, I found that out:
https://www.linkedin.com/pub/vincent-flesouras/18/a93/435

> I've worked at a web agency, freelance, subcontract and now I work at
> SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory as their Sr. Drupal Architect.
> 
> I've created and manage a lot of websites. During my freelance years, I
> met with a lot of clients that had many of the same concerns you do. I
> will tell you that doing it all yourself for the first time is
> invaluable in terms of experience gained. In fact, I love it when
> clients take a stab at creating their own site. If they coded it from
> the ground up and had to muddle through design, development and
> deployment they have a deeper appreciation of what it is I do, and why
> it isn't cheap.

It "shouldn't" be cheap but many tools have made it so easy to deploy a
site these days that it's hard to make any money at it. The people I've
met who work with web design and such have mostly ended up only being
able to do it as a side gig. That is, unless they have been lucky enough
to get into a company that maintains large accounts and then just work
as an employee to a dev group.

> When you're starting out there is no magic button. There are sites like
> Wix that allow you to rapidly construct parts of pre-developed blocks. 
> Customizing those and getting it all working to your satisfaction is
> difficult at best. I recommend you play around so you'll realize that
> isn't the way to go.

I tried Wix early on when I could "actually" iframe the "free"
development into a different domain space. It was really easy and the
clients thought it was great. It only took the Wix team a few months to
catch on then changed their code base to prevent it. Now one has to buy
a Wix hosting plan. It's ok, but not that awesome and as I recall a lot
of their work is flash based but some work was being done for HTML5.
It's been a year or so since I've seen what they do.

> Dreamweaver is a good starting place to get your feet wet with HTML and
> CSS. But, if you want any kind of dynamic content, or wish to use
> databases to store content, you'll rapidly discover the limitations of
> WYSIWYG tools. Albeit, static HTML hosting is incredibly cheap. Follow
> some of the thousands of tutorials on the web:
> https://helpx.adobe.com/dreamweaver/how-to/first-website-part1.html 
> play around with several different IDE's and languages.

You're right. A lot of people will use whatever tools they can to avoid
having to learn any kind of language whether it's HTML, CSS, javascript,
PHP or whatever. They want to build their own sites but they don't want
to have to code anything. Many people want drag-and-drop like
VisualStudio provides or like they do with Word or Powerpoint. If they
do have to do any code then they want it to be very minimal that they
can find someone to do for them; like change a color or an image inside
a CMS template.

> A step up from Dreamweaver is Wordpress. It requires some chops in terms
> of installation and first time setup, but that is mitigated by hosting
> providers that often times have it installed already or use Cpanel to
> install it.

Sorry, but I disagree on the installation part as the setup only takes
"five minutes" based on their advertising. The good part is that there
are lots of plug-ins to choose from and working with the platform is
pretty much point-and-click. That is until "custom" work needs to be
done and one has to go inside the code base and tweak parts of the code
to get the results they desire.

Some hosting providers offer two options of installing a CMS. One way is
through their "simple" installer where they do all the execution for you
then provide a password to the admin panel and the other way is from raw
where the webmaster does the full install themselves. Each way has it's
own merits. The first way allows for possible recovery if something goes
wrong from a password recovery or botched upgrade which is often done
automatically by the hosting company. The second way allows for more
administrative control but updates are on the webmaster who also is
responsible to backing up the database. Either way depends on the
comfort level of the webmaster and how much maintenance time they are
willing to invest into the deployment.

I had an advertising place offer to pay me once to figure out why
"certain" images wouldn't show up across the four various WP sites they
had. I checked everything inside the admin panel as well as permissions
on the images themselves. When I asked for the address and password for
the hosting account so I could go into the backend and check permissions
there is when they admitted their sites were all hosted in India and
they were fighting with their hosting company about access rights and
hidden fees. I packed my things and left and wished them good luck.

> Then, there is my bread and butter, Drupal. It's a fantastic Open Source
> CMS that is flexible and extendable to the point of being a detriment to
> itself.

We had a Drupal site running for EBLUG that I replaced for a hand coded
site. Drupal is a nice platform (but still a platform). The EBLUG group
started with PHPnuke a number of years ago then switched to Drupal. I
guess they had a hard time finding people who could manage a website via
code alone. Some people mentioned that Drupal has a steep learning curve
but I didn't think so. I had the bulk of it figured out in about 4 hours
from no experience with it at all.

Drupal is fine for a dynamic CMS deployment and the admin panel isn't
that hard to tweak and figure out. In the case of EBLUG it was simply
overkill as all of our information was static anyway and I have been
coding by hand for so long it's actually easier for me to maintain and
modify then working with Drupal. The footprint on the site is also a lot
smaller now and more flexible since we aren't tied to MySQL any more.

> One of the things I have learned is that clients don't care what
> language is used to make their website, for most of them it's all magic
> anyway. What they want is to quickly update content  to communicate
> something; Be it news, new products, emergency notices. The nuts and
> bolts don't matter to the uninitiated. In terms of stability, upgrade
> paths and the ability to effect change I have my biases, but all of them
> require digging in and learning a whole lot about the innards of
> servers, programming languages such as javascript, PHP and .NET. and how
> the internet works in general.

I fully agree with you. It's why I'm taking the time to learn DNS now
and then how to implement HTTPS. I'm not one to be satisfied with just
building websites without knowing how to configure Apache, CGI, MySQL,
NoSQL, or DNS. I like to know how it all works from front to back.

Even the three major CMS deployments (Drupal, WP or Joomla) require one
to go into the base code and modify things so that the deployment
doesn't look "cookie cutter". Looking the same as everything else is my
only gripe with the CMS packages. They work great, but they still
require a lot of work to look in any way like original design.

> Your first decision is weather or not you want to be a client or do it
> yourself.  You're on a Linux user group, so I imagine you're not foreign
> to command lines and trying things out. But if you're simply wanting to
> get it done, then I'd find a developer that is hungry but honest. Not an
> easy task in SV, but they exist everywhere.

LOL! I don't know if I'd say I'm hungry, more like starving really. As
for honest? Yes, absolutely. At least until I find out my client is
trying to pull one over on me or screw me in some way. Then I get really
nasty and ugly; as most would suspect from any honest person who
believes they are getting screwed over or being led astray. I know that
sounds horribly negative but when it happens a few times over then a
person changes their perspective.

I used to offer to throw sites together for people for relatively
reasonable fees. Now I prefer to "show" people how to throw one together
for themselves and coddle them through the process. This way, when they
call freaking out that something has gone awry I can simply walk them
through fixing it via email or over the phone. This also relieves me
from being held accountable for passwords and such, I don't want them,
don't want to know about them, don't need them. If I "do" end up having
to fix things myself, I _always_ tell them to change the passwords after
I'm done. Only the "owner" of the site should have that info.

EBLUG had to pull teeth to get the access codes from the person who was
maintaining the site previously. When we finally got them, the previous
person had left the site open to having the user page open for spamming
and we ended up with a trashed list of almost 100,000 bogus site user
information that was climbing at the rate of a few thousand per hour;
Obviously being added from a script. Yeah, real classy webmaster there.

> Regardless of what you choose, I recommend at least getting your feet
> wet with some of the open source IDE's and doing some of the initial
> introduction tutorials like http://www.codecademy.com/en/tracks/htmlcss

Hmm.... I'm beginning to believe your message was more intended for
Kevin Rossi, the OP. No worries though.

CodeAcademy is a nice site, I've done some Python study there. W3schools
is good too. I've always people who want to learn web should start with
an Apache install on localhost and learn how to move the files into
place as well as permissions first. This way, when they write their
first html file, they know where it should go and how it will look on
the web before jumping into buying a domain and figuring out how they
want to do hosting and fees.

I did the reverse and ended up spending money on something I had no idea
how to work with. I don't recommend this to new web devs as it's
frustrating to know they are spending money on something they aren't
getting any return on. Also, they may decide six or eight months down
the road they don't like doing it or don't like their host or something.
It's much cheaper to set up a localhost Apache instance and learn from
there before jumping into any fees.


-- 
Scott DuBois BSIT
President EBLUG
Freenode: Roguehorse