April 2010

Dear Client,

We had our T1 line go down twice during the first week this last month. Neither instance was weather related—there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The reality is, Qwest hasn’t been maintaining their infrastructure as they should. Copper wires don’t last indefinitely. Over time copper oxide forms around the lines and they become brittle. And sometimes break. Some cables our T1 runs through are up to 40 years old. That’s well outside industry standards.

I’ve contacted my favorite person in Qwest to resolve this issue on a permanent basis. They are looking at different options, including replacing about a mile or so of underground cable vs connecting us to an active fiber line that runs less than a ¼ mile north of us (I’d certainly go for that option). Bottom line is, it is going to be fixed. Soon. While outages aren’t that common, in the last 5 years we’ve had more Qwest-related outages than our entire history of 15 years. That’s just unacceptable.

If they don’t do something to fix it, when our contract comes up later this year we will switch to a wireless carrier and circumvent Qwest completely.

On a related note, we’ve been experiencing sporadic reboots of our router for some time now. Doesn’t happen for several days, then it will reset 2 or 3 times in a row. We’ve run diagnostics on it and turned up nothing. It’s one of those pieces of hardware that you can’t really keep down for very long, because everything is offline when it is. So we’ll be replacing it with a new one on one of the Sunday morning preventative maintence (PM) times (6-8 am).

A hot topic recently in certain circles for website design is the use of an application called a Content Management System, or CMS. They allow end users without formal web training to update their site and add new pages.

The benefits appear to be pretty significant—rather than paying a web developer to design and build a site, presumably one could do it themselves or have an employee create the site.

We have looked at several CMS systems and after carefully considering them, have decided not to off one to our clients. Here are the reasons why:

While CMS systems do mask the intricacies of web development, often they are non-trivial to learn themselves. Most we looked at had quirks and the learning curve for the CMS system itself was steep. So why not invest the time and money into learning a standard design package like Dreamweaver or Xara Web Designer?

When you design a site in a CMS, the result is not a set of web pages. It’s a set of configuration options that the CMS responds to when your website is called. You are then forever tied to that CMS and that provider. There is no way to make a backup of your site and save a copy. If that provider goes out of business or is down for an extended period, you are out of luck. Don’t like the host’s terms? You start over from scratch when you go somewhere else. We are strongly opposed to holding our clients hostage and won’t support a system that puts you in that position.

More generally, CMS packages don’t have the same flexibility that a good web designer can bring to the table. It takes a lot of experience and training to do excellent design work. Even with training, some things just can’t be taught (like creative design and graphic ideas). A top-notch web designer is worth the time and money it takes. Having a poorly designed website is worse than not having one at all.

Too often websites created in a CMS package look like they were created by someone in accounting. They may be functional—but they aren’t flattering.

Sincerely,

Ben Conner