Well first things first, I’d better introduce myself. I’m Andrew Odri, a senior developer at a small software company called Konductor in Vancouver. I have worked with content management for while, and have worked with Adobe tools a lot. And here is what I have noticed…
Good web designers love designing web sites. And most of them use Dreamweaver. On the flip side, good designers don’t usually want to get bogged down setting up web servers, FTP servers, configuring Dreamweaver to work with these, and having to go through this process over and over just to edit some content at a later date. I guess that’s kinda obvious.
Then we have the clients of web designers. I’m just going to call them users for now. Users usually just want to change content, edit menus and add new pages. They know what they want to add, and they know what it should look like. In many cases, they want a new product page to look pretty similar to there old product page. What they don’t want is a big blank page with nothing in it. Or a scary interface that is just as complicated as Dreamweaver (*cough* Contribute *cough*). And they don’t want to bug their designer all the time just to make simple changes.
Anyway, those are some of the big problems I’ve noticed. Theres lots of little ones ones too. For example, does your user want to put a new photo on their site? Its 12 megapixels… So they either A) have to resize it themselves, or B) upload the whole thing to server. And what about previewing pages as you edit? True pixel perfect WYSIWYG, especially with custom designs, doesn’t exist at the moment.
Anyway, we are working on some tools using Dreamweaver extensions and Adobe AIR to get this right. We are actually really far along too. We have been working with Teknision for our AIR interfaces, consulting with Nitobi for our Dreamweaver extensions, and using our own expertise in this area to build the back end web services. We have them all talking to each other already.
We have a lot of exciting stuff post, and will be doing so very shortly. We are super excited about what we are sitting on right now – I hope you will be too!
More (substantial) stuff shortly…
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