Moving from website services to web applications

I am happy to announce that I willl be soon joining the Cakemail development team and leaving my current front-end developer position at w.illi.am/. After more than 5 years of being in the website service business, this will be a welcomed change.

There is just a couple of itchy things about the website gig that I wanted to take the time to talk about today. It’s probably going to sound negative a bit, but no job is perfect and I certainly enjoyed, for the most of it, my work in this area.

Everyone has a cms

In every company I worked, everyone had a custom CMS, some better than others. But in almost every company I worked for, the boss wanted to “monetize” there investment in the development of their CMS.

This always eluded me, you can’t monetize something everyone has and is even given for free on the internet. This is only a tool to get contracts. And guess what, most CMS are not really that good. They are generally coded by good and average people and the documentation is generally nonexistent. Your CMS is not the next best shit, it just serves the purpose of editing texts and images.

It’s a big wheel

Doing websites is a never ending story, you got (just an example, don’t be picky): pitch, get the contract, do wireframes, design it, mashup your cms, html template, integrate it, add a jQuery carroussel, your done! You need to be very inventive as a developer to keep your flame going.

After sometime you get the process, and it’s even clearer when people do a bad job on your project because of the ‘flow’ slowing down.

I want my website now

Website with a fixed release date are generally the worse. Developers are last in line of every other departments, sif one department is late, developers have less time to do the website, if all departments are late, you’re in deep shit.

What clients and company bosses don’t seem to understand, it’s that if developers are rushed, the quality generally plummets in the toilet.

You can’t squeeze an orange and expect it to be all round and beautiful later. It’s not because it looks like the design that the website is well coded. It’s probably going to be a maintenance nightmare later, but let’s worry about that later… anyway maintenance cost are not included in the pitch generally.

Old website maintenance stinks

When you’re doing maintenance on an old website, you know you are in for some trouble. It’s even worse when it’s not your company that developed it. A lot of people don’t care about good code, you always get bad surprises like weird CMS, messy html and css, and very bad javascript code.

And don’t even get me started about doing Flash maintenance…

I’m really amaze that some people dedicated to website maintenance put up with this every day. Personally I will generally tend to think about a bridge from which to throw myself down before trying to open an old flash file from someone else.

No job is perfect

I just wanted to reflect my problems with the websites business, I know that the grass is not really greener at the next house. Granted no job is perfect and I am happy that I can do a job that I really like, but I am really excited to see what web application development has in store for me.