It has become apparent that UIs and Web pages benefit/suffer from fashions nearly as much as clothing!  While Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg may have eschewed fashions in favor of zen simplicity, most of the world wants a refresh in what they wear and look at.  Thus as intuitively simple skeuomorphic interfaces gave way to flat and colorful, it didn’t matter that UI guru Jakob Nielsen complained that the flat interface reduced discoverability and led to low information density.  There are other points of contention, and flat interfaces have their selling points in a responsive universe.

But while interfaces change to adapt to new technology, it is also possible that people just want something new to look at.  MacOSX Aqua seemed cool when it first became available, and Apple tried to go after countless attempts to rip it off.  But now it does look dated.

Web UIs seem to suffer more than anything else. It seems like just when a convention yields fast clean easy UIs, a new fad or technology comes in and wipes it out.  One hot fashion that I am completely sick of is “Infinite Scrolling”. I can see the arguments in favor – simplicity, a single action and point of focus, and ease in delivering the single call to action.  But it was only a few years ago that web pundits advised against forcing people to scroll. Even Nielsen has warned that this is not a good idea in several instances.

Here is an article explaining 7 reasons why Infinite Scrolling is probably a bad idea.  Of course it is a bad idea, except when it isn’t! There is no such thing as one size fits all.  Consideration of audience, content and usability should be part of every design.  Usability testing is always a good idea.

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In 2005 or so, I stopped creating websites from scratch in favor of using a Content Management System (CMS). The benefit was clear: using well vetted code to avoid reinventing the wheel, and being able to focus on design, content and custom functionality. A CMS also allows easy updates to core code as well as design or content changes.  Modules or plugins allow adding new functions easily, and creating new plugins made code reuse easy.

In my first round of research, the Drupal CMS came out on top, and I developed several sites starting from version 4 up to version 7. About that time, I had customers specifically requesting WordPress, so I began creating sites with that as well. About the same time, there was chatter about the fact that Drupal 8 was going to be more enterprise-centric with a difficult upgrade path from 7. While this will obviously fill a need, most of my customers are small businesses that are seeking to avoid complexity and cost.  One response to the difficulties presented by Drupal 8 was to fork the Drupal 7 code into Backdrop, a CMS that preserves the ease of Drupal 7, while implementing some of the newer features found in Drupal 8.

There has long been a perception that WordPress is simple, but not terribly flexible, and is best for blogs, while Drupal and the like is better for full featured sites.  This was certainly true early on, and is still true for large enterprise sites, but with the incredible market share that WordPress has, it has slowly gained a lot of advanced features, at least through plugins, if not the core code itself.

WordPress also has a powerful range of theme options from many existing themes to frameworks for rapid development to minimal themes allowing customization without complete creation from scratch.

As a result of these developments, I have made WordPress my default CMS for my small business customers, for websites or landing pages. WordPress will still have some limitations, so I plan to keep my eye on the Drupal ecosystem, especially on Backdrop for when extra features are needed.  Realistically, my knowledge of LAMP, especially PHP and CSS allows me to be up to speed on any CMS quickly, but my approach to rapid deployment sites makes it desirable to automate installs with scripts and be able to develop custom themes quickly.  I have also done a site for a photographer using Koken.

If you want to drill down into more detail, the CMS Matrix site, allows you to compare features of over 1200 CMSes!

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