A couple of guys, new to web development, are interested in creating a website prototype for their exciting new idea as part of a campaign to attract venture capital. With very little background in any of the technologies involved in web development, they are feeling their way with a little help from their friends, including me. They just emailed:

Hi George,

If you have a sec will you take a look at wix.com and let me know if you see any problems with using it to create a basic mock up for our site?
(Seems like, for our purposes, it will be much better and easier than photoshop, no?)

Thx George...

Like many folks, these friends have gotten the impression that web development can be made 'easy' if only you can find the right tools. That somehow one can bypass the hard stuff to make a stunning site, just like those other folks whose sites are displayed as examples. Perhaps that works for a site that presents "My Vacation" or "Family Photos." And some restricted-purpose sites, such as a portfolio for an artist of photographer, look great right out of the can. (See my favorite, ShutterBug.) But when it comes to a complex commercial site, with a graphic look, an organization and a feature set all its own, all one can do is make the development 'easier,' not 'easy.' And the limitations that make an instant website-maker 'easy,' are often exactly the ones that make it very hard to get what you really want.

I didn't say all that in my reply to the email. I focused on just getting the desired look in a site that wouldn't actually DO anything except present a series of pages according to a demonstration script. Here's what I said:

I don't see any problems using wix.com (new to me) as a basis for a false-front website.  It's worth saying, though, that the beautiful graphics in the templates are most likely not quite what you'll want, and Photoshop or other imaging software will be required to develop the graphic images you DO want.  The example sites show many examples where a graphically-sophisticated web developer has started with a wix.com template and then modified it, mostly in terms of images and text-as-image.  Anybody can give you a variety of ways to put text on the screen -- on the left, in boxes, in columns, in menus -- but the test of an attractive website is usually not text, in these media-conscious days, but graphics.

A sad characteristic of technology is its impermanence. It's not so much the death of the machine that bothers me: it's the entombment of one's work that often accompanies it. For example, of the twelve published educational software titles I have designed and developed, not one can run on the computer on which I type these words. Screen shots (if you were thoughtful enough to take them at the time) are no substitute, either.

That's what I thought until yesterday, anyway. Thanks to cleverer folks than I who have also lost work in the graveyard of old operating systems (or who have lost favorite games too), I now can run my Mac OS 9 software on my Intel Mac OS X 10.5.8 laptop. What pleasure it has been to re-connect with old friends! Bank Street Writer. Geography Search. Graph Action and Graph Action Plus. Chance Encounters. Imagine that books and magazines were suddenly glued shut, or that canvases or sculpture collapsed overnight in scrambled shards. That's what it's been like for me, and that's why I'm so pleased today.

I hope by this means to recover some of the good ideas I had, translating them into my current technological environment. The ideas weren't bad, it was just the medium in which they were expressed. Oh, I do know this problem is mostly unsolvable -- whatever I do tomorrow will no doubt be lost again someday. But for the moment at least some of my work has risen from the dead.

For the software that has made my day, see http://hotfilms.org/non-windows/sheepshaver-mac-os-9-classic-intel-13879.html.

Tags: Musings, Announcements

I have started a new part of the Files section of this site, On-Rev Snippets, to make available small amounts of RevTalk code (the scripting language of RunRev) for use in sites hosted, as this one is, at on-rev.com. Read More...

I've been working lately with another very promising tool: the documentation development environment ScreenSteps and its online publishing partner, ScreenSteps Live by Blue Mango Learning Systems. Read More...

As of this moment, the new George’s Place is live, with a re-direct in place from my old site. Some things are missing:

• Two articles on Joomla! 1.0 and 1.5, which are now out of date.
• The silly but fun stuff -- stories and poems. I may publish them elsewhere.

Some new stuff:

• Teachable Moments, where you can use exploratory environments right on the site.
• This blog, which I hope to keep active and interesting enough. Time will tell.