[LINK] Worrying about the Dark Ages (was Re: ANAO report: Government Agencies' Management of their Websites)

[Stilgherrian]

At the rick of incurring the Wrath of the Gods by top-posting, yes, I  
can confirm that there are many web developers who know very little  
about the Internet or its technology -- mostly because they work for a  
"marketing" or "design" firm, and learnt their "web deign" using  
Dreamweaver and follow-the-procedure upload techniques using the FTP  
tools built into same.

I currently have one client on my business' shared hosting server  
(Linux with cPanel/WHM) who had their website built by their marketing  
company. The marketing company have "lost" the guy which knew PHP and  
MySQL, and they have no knowledge in-house now to understand how their  
database-driven website actually works. Further, because the website  
is on one of several domains within the cPanel account, the group of  
companies does not want to give master access t this marketing firm --  
or at least whenever I ask whether they can have such access the  
request disappears into the void as the discussion grinds to a halt.

So, whenever they need to change the contents of the database, a  
designer with no knowledge of SQL uses templated copies to SQ scripts,  
which they email to my support team, who run it and report back the  
errors. This is, of curse, the most efficient way of maintaining a  
website in the entire universe.

Stil



On 21/12/2008, at 9:30 AM, Craig Sanders wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 06:14:52PM +1000, Lea de Groot wrote:
>> On 20/12/2008, at 5:30 PM, Craig Sanders wrote:
>>
>>> it's not even that they think that uploading 1MB jpegs is OK rather
>>> than small web-optimised GIF or PNG versions of the same image -
>>> it's that they don't think of it AT ALL because it would never occur
>>> to them that there is anything to think about. have picture, point,
>>> click, upload.
>>
>> Well, no, not quite.
>> I'm not aware of who the current team at Fairfax are, but the lads  
>> who
>
> i wasn't talking specifically about the fairfax developers. it was
> a generalisation based on my experiences when attempting to report
> problems with web sites to their developers and on many of the web
> developers that i know and have worked with.
>
> craig
>
> -- 
> craig sanders <cas at taz.net.au>
> _______________________________________________
> Link mailing list
> Link at mailman.anu.edu.au
> http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link


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