Remember the webmaster? The hero of the mid-1990s? The webmaster was the one guy or gal in the office to know enough HTML to update the fax number on your site’s contact page. The modern content management system (CMS) has pretty much eliminated the need for a webmaster. Rejoice! Now everyone in the office knows how to update the fax number.

Until recently, though, you still needed the webmaster’s brighter cousin, the web developer, to get your website up and running in the first place. The developer helped you to install and configure the content manager, to keep it humming along, to piece together its features for your own site. And alas, the process typically cost more time and money than anyone expected, the developer included.

I think this web developer role is next up to follow the webmaster into obscurity, at least for the most common website categories: marketing sites, news sites, online magazines. Software like Big Medium makes the custom software developer unnecessary for all but the biggest and most ambitious of those organizations.

My hope is that Big Medium makes it as easy to create commercial content sites as blogging software has made it to create personal journals. (Several customers have already told me that they found it easier to install Big Medium 2 than it was to set up Wordpress and other blog software; that’s high praise.)

Big Medium is a content management system for mere mortals.

Unlike most CMS systems, Big Medium is aimed squarely at web designers and their clients -- not developers or CMS ninjas. It’s a content management system for mere mortals. No programming guru required. It’s easy to install and runs in just about any hosting environment.

Big Medium is basically a pre-configured CMS that is tuned to deliver the most common features for the most common types of content sites. It doesn’t try to solve every problem or create every type of site. Indeed, it has an implicit point of view on what a content site should be, and it provides the associated tools in a way that designers can blend directly into their HTML.

If you’re a web designer, I think you’ll love it. It’s actually fun to use. Rather than enforcing a cookie-cutter layout, it bends gracefully to your design vision.

When the designer, or even the content editor, can install and configure their own CMS with all of the features they need, the web developer as middle man is just plain redundant. For a broad category of sites, Big Medium solves the pain of content management, no coding needed.

The web developer and the wheel

I’m not suggesting that the web developer is extinct. Hardly. As a web developer myself, this is an exciting time with an onslaught of new developments. The field is bursting with possibilities -- so many, in fact, that we developers shouldn’t waste our time reinventing the wheel.

The common content site is no longer a challenging software problem. The basic feature set has been solved. It wastes developers’ energies (and their clients’ money) to tap powerful CMS platforms to assemble these features from scratch every time.

See, most CMS’s are not themselves finished software in the way that most consumers understand software. A CMS is typically a platform that’s intended to be used to build other software, a set of building blocks that programmers can piece together to build something for regular folks to use. These powerful general-purpose systems are terrific -- amazing really. But they’re typically intended for developers, not for web designers and certainly not for content editors.

Big Medium takes the system higher up the stack, providing a CMS that is already pieced together into a polished, packaged application that’s easy to use and appropriate for typical content sites.

All that remains is for web designers to apply their magic, and for writers and editors to supply the main ingredients. Web developers and heavy-duty CMS platforms can in the meantime be deployed to new challenges. It’s good news all around.

Republished with the permission of Josh Clark
http://globalmoxie.com/blog/farewell-developer.shtml