Tools for Content Production
By Ray Valdés
In last month's column, I discussed the four dimensions of platform selection. In case you missed it, these dimensions consist of: the vertical stack ranging from hardware to software, the horizontal scope of different applications, the political dimension, and the temporal dimension of upward compatibility. One might think four dimensions would be sufficient to cover all aspects of platforms.
However, I didn't examine the issue of development-time vs. runtime platforms. The two aren't always the same. These days, the platform used for constructing Web-site content and components is as important for success as the platform used for assembly and delivery of finished pages to the user.
A successful Web site is updated early and often. Every time a user visits, there should be some reward—a new tidbit of information or an interactive element. The interval between updates should be much shorter than the average interval between visits: If you want a user to visit your site every week, then update it several times per week. To get people to visit your site every day, you should update it more than once per day.
This is, of course, much easier said than done. Every finished page shipped from the Web server is an assemblage of components created by many people from different disciplines, both inside and outside the organization, including authors, designers, HTML coders, Java scripters, server-side programmers, database schema architects, QA personnel, and so on. If you try to ratchet the numbers upward, in terms of number of pages, components, and frequency of update, you'll face what mathematicians call a combinatorial explosion in the number of interactions between the entities that comprise this process.
