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I am curruently working on several large scale redesigns for my company's web sites. These sites are heavily content driven and are comprised of many thousands of unique pages which are updated by a handfull (5-10) of content updaters. These updaters fall into a wide range of expertise spanning from those who rarely switch to design view in Dreamweaver, to those who never look at code view can couldn't hand-code a table or a list without WYSIWYG assistance.
In these updates I'm planning to move to an extremely standards-compliant design that will probably be XHTML 4.0 transitional, with a rigid separation between design and structure. We syndicate much of our content and I want to make it easy as possible to pass these pages off to other content venues.
Unfortunately this switch requires many of these updaters to learn more about code than is currently required. A lot of them have been copy-pasting from Word, Excell, Lotus Notes, other web sites, for more than 5 years and under the current site model this works. True, the sites are riddled with thousands of FONT tags, CENTER tags, and other garbage but the ease of copying and pasting into Dreamweaver has become second nature. There's a tremendous value in ease of updates, but when using standards I fail to see where this "ease" is will come from. All the aforementioned apps add their own crazy chunks of code when you paste into a WYSIWYG, and I can already forsee a beautiful, semantically correct site falling into complete disarray in the first few weeks. They say:
"When I look at the page I just made, it looks fine."
and I say:
"Well what you pasted in from Microsoft Word isn't actually a list. It's a bunch of break tags and bullet tags wrapped inside a thousand table cells."
"So?"
Training these people to ADD steps as we move into the future is going to be difficult, namely because the learning curve for many of these people is pretty steep. I am not in a place to move people around, nor am I in the position to spend hours training them.
Any ideas? Would switching everyone to Contribute be better? Without a CMS, what is the best way to unleash a standards-based site to the masses?
Thanks for your help,
Christopher
I'm planning to move to an extremely standards-compliant design that will probably be XHTML 4.0 transitionalI think you may have things confused here. XHTML is only at 1.x right now. From the sounds of it your updaters probably won't be too happy about the change. ;)
If you want standards compliant code you really have to separate the content from the design. The best way to force this on your updaters is to go with a CMS where you control the templates and they can only update text in limited areas. If you stick with a WYSIWYG then it sounds like you will have a lot of training to conduct.
There was a recent entry and some discussion on exact same topic at Mezzoblue. Entry called "Who Cares about Semantics Anyway?"
I think you may have things confused here. XHTML is only at 1.x right now. From the sounds of it your updaters probably won't be too happy about the change. ;)
Oops, an honest mistake. Thanks for the input Bill.
Moltar, I'll check out the thread.
