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If your company is small and you want to have a website where people can learn about your products/services and call you for more information, these days you ca

If your company is small and you want to have a website where people can learn about your products/services and call you for more information, these days you can use established tools, templates, frameworks, libraries ( like say Wordpress ) to whip one up quickly. If you consider updating your website quite often you would want that expertise in house and maybe turn your web site into a web application. At that point, I feel that design cannot be decoupled from engineering. Engineers need to understand principles of UX so that they can design good user experiences and designers need to know the constraints of what is possible with the current state of the art and the amount of resources available. Maybe design and engineering is merging into single role and is causing the effects described in the article.

threesixandnine 10y ago
The thing with whipping a website with tools, templates, frameworks, libraries - WP is that at the end you don't get any traffic/visitors and it's useless and slow - most of the time. We get so much queries from the small business owners why their site doesn't bring any new customers. It's all because of "templating". They end up pretty much with an "online business" card. The whole thing is a screw up from the ground up. It takes us months to get their website anywhere where it can be seen...most of the time it would be better to just do it from scratch. And at the end cheaper. If you're serious about your business you will hire a team that can do the design, copy and SEO so that you can actually bring new clients at your door.
- wanda 10y ago
  What do you mean by SEO that isn't covered, at some point, by high quality, well-researched design and copy?
  - lifeisstillgood 10y ago
    I think the parent means that if you want to have a website that ranks well for "southern Texas dog grooming" you should start not from a nice looking Wordpress template but from "I need to produce weekly articles on dog grooming tips, make some videos that are easy to share on Facebook, ensure that the headlines are AB tested and ..." Y'know, an organised approach the beating the competition
spriggan3 10y ago
> Engineers need to understand principles of UX Engineers need to do a lot of things these days, they are expected to be DBA, ops, network administrators,server administrators on Linux and Windows, graphic designers, UX specialists, HTML integrators, data analysts, security specialists, do sells jobs,customer support and what not. They are required to know 10 languages with all the frameworks and libraries, with 5 years of experience in each language... Of course, each of these domains used to be a full time job itself, but now, engineers are asked to wear all these hats at the same time. That's how businesses end up with people who know Angular but barely know Javascript, who know Bootstrap but don't understand CSS box model, who know Mysql, Postgres, Mongodb without basic understanding of data modelling, who know framework X,Y,Z but would be incapable of writing an application secured with a basic authentication system from scratch, who know Docker and AWS but wouldn't be capable of setting up a basic local linux server. but that's not the fault of these engineers, that's what businesses ask, jacks of all trades without any craftsmanship.
- jon-wood 10y ago
  I'd rather look at this from a different angle - years of refinement and the development of new frameworks and tooling has led to many tasks being much simpler than they previously were. The first time I had to set up a highly available service I had to do everything from the ground up - replicated block devices for generated configuration, a master-master MySQL setup, a floating IP address, and monitoring to know when to fail over. If I had to, I probably still could. Now I just click a few buttons in the AWS console and I've got an S3 bucket, a replicated database server in two different data centres, a load balancer which can do health checks, and a small cluster of EC2 instances running my application. I could do it in a few hours, leaving me the rest of the week to work on the application itself. The same is true for other parts of the stack, I've got application frameworks dealing with all the boilerplate I used to write, front-end frameworks helping me build responsive UIs, and CSS frameworks to make it all look nice. I could do all of those things from scratch if there was some reason to do so, but why would I want to waste my time reinventing the wheel? The end result of all this is that yes, I now do a job in which I do many things, some of which have previously been the entirety of jobs I've had, and I find it fantastic fun. Although if you would like to hire someone who knows JavaScript, understands the CSS box model and data modeling, has written several application frameworks from scratch, and can build a local Linux server from a blank hard disk and a distro image, my email address is in my profile ;)

threesixandnine 10y ago

The thing with whipping a website with tools, templates, frameworks, libraries - WP is that at the end you don't get any traffic/visitors and it's useless and slow - most of the time. We get so much queries from the small business owners why their site doesn't bring any new customers. It's all because of "templating". They end up pretty much with an "online business" card. The whole thing is a screw up from the ground up. It takes us months to get their website anywhere where it can be seen...most of the time it would be better to just do it from scratch. And at the end cheaper. If you're serious about your business you will hire a team that can do the design, copy and SEO so that you can actually bring new clients at your door.

wanda 10y ago
What do you mean by SEO that isn't covered, at some point, by high quality, well-researched design and copy?
- lifeisstillgood 10y ago
  I think the parent means that if you want to have a website that ranks well for "southern Texas dog grooming" you should start not from a nice looking Wordpress template but from "I need to produce weekly articles on dog grooming tips, make some videos that are easy to share on Facebook, ensure that the headlines are AB tested and ..." Y'know, an organised approach the beating the competition

spriggan3 10y ago

> Engineers need to understand principles of UX Engineers need to do a lot of things these days, they are expected to be DBA, ops, network administrators,server administrators on Linux and Windows, graphic designers, UX specialists, HTML integrators, data analysts, security specialists, do sells jobs,customer support and what not. They are required to know 10 languages with all the frameworks and libraries, with 5 years of experience in each language... Of course, each of these domains used to be a full time job itself, but now, engineers are asked to wear all these hats at the same time. That's how businesses end up with people who know Angular but barely know Javascript, who know Bootstrap but don't understand CSS box model, who know Mysql, Postgres, Mongodb without basic understanding of data modelling, who know framework X,Y,Z but would be incapable of writing an application secured with a basic authentication system from scratch, who know Docker and AWS but wouldn't be capable of setting up a basic local linux server. but that's not the fault of these engineers, that's what businesses ask, jacks of all trades without any craftsmanship.

jon-wood 10y ago
I'd rather look at this from a different angle - years of refinement and the development of new frameworks and tooling has led to many tasks being much simpler than they previously were. The first time I had to set up a highly available service I had to do everything from the ground up - replicated block devices for generated configuration, a master-master MySQL setup, a floating IP address, and monitoring to know when to fail over. If I had to, I probably still could. Now I just click a few buttons in the AWS console and I've got an S3 bucket, a replicated database server in two different data centres, a load balancer which can do health checks, and a small cluster of EC2 instances running my application. I could do it in a few hours, leaving me the rest of the week to work on the application itself. The same is true for other parts of the stack, I've got application frameworks dealing with all the boilerplate I used to write, front-end frameworks helping me build responsive UIs, and CSS frameworks to make it all look nice. I could do all of those things from scratch if there was some reason to do so, but why would I want to waste my time reinventing the wheel? The end result of all this is that yes, I now do a job in which I do many things, some of which have previously been the entirety of jobs I've had, and I find it fantastic fun. Although if you would like to hire someone who knows JavaScript, understands the CSS box model and data modeling, has written several application frameworks from scratch, and can build a local Linux server from a blank hard disk and a distro image, my email address is in my profile ;)