Hippies: your web site's silent enemy?

Gerry McGovern has a bizarre piece over at ClickZ where he says “The Web’s Hippie Period Is Over” :

Do hippies and pioneers run your Web site? Are the same people who got things going in the mid-’90s still in charge today? Probably not a good idea. A very interesting bunch of people was attracted to the Web in the early days. They loved its lawless nature; it allowed them to experiment and express themselves.

These people tended to be techies and graphic designers. What you need today are writers and editors. The technical elements of a Web site are largely solved. The graphic design elements are relatively minor. The day-to-day job of the average site is writing and editing.

Is this the same Gerry McGovern that told us,

Content management software hasn’t worked because it was badly designed and massively over-hyped. Software companies lied about their products, charging criminal prices for crap software. It hasn’t worked because organizations didn’t understand content. They wanted a quick fix. They issued specifications that bore little relation to what they actually needed.

The techies and graphic designers didn’t buy all those lousy content-management systems or Flash-infested agency-built web sites that still plague us. Those are the legacy of the suits and carpetbaggers who never understood content or its presentation. The techies and graphic designers have brought us common-sense alternatives like PHP, MySQL, and CSS.

I agree that the technical and graphic design problems of the Web are largely solved, and good techies and designers don’t reinvent the wheel. They do help you find the right wheel for your vehicle and attach it so that it won’t fall off.

One thought on “Hippies: your web site's silent enemy?

  1. Hippies smoked my website
    Via MediaSavvy (a site whose brand combines two of my favorite buzzwords of recent times), I found this article on The Web’s Hippie Period is So Over. It’s an amusing spin on the usual web dev chitchat, despite its ahistorical spin on the recent past. …

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.