Hacks and Home-Page Improvements
By Dale Dougherty
A Web site with any history behind it probably got started as a weekend or late-night project. Initially, it was no more than a home page, but it has grown and grown since then -- all part of a continuous home-page improvement project.
What makes any Web project challenging is the learning curve for advanced HTML, JavaScript, CGI, Perl, Java. The only real limit on what you can do is how fast you can learn something new. Most importantly, you have to begin to act on what you know without knowing everything. You may also develop your own ideas about how things ought to work.
As staffs and budgets for creating Web sites grow, Web work becomes much more professional and specialized. Today, the ideal home-page improvement project should have an architect, general and specialized building contractors, and interior designers. Much of this is good, and the end result better.
But as Web development expands, there's a shift from a pragmatic, bottom-up development model to a comprehensive, top-down model. Information systems professionals are getting involved, now that the Web has proven itself as a platform. IS makes the argument that it can manage Web development just as it does other projects.
The idea may begin to circulate that the Web development team is a bunch of hackers who can't be trusted with handling enterprise-wide Web development. What manager wants a "fixer upper" when IS promises a more polished information palace?
Even the original Web team members might feel that their own efforts have been inadequate.
