Innovation in College Media

a group discussion about the future of student media

Guest Post: Hand-coding vs. CMS? Hand-coding gives essential experience

Posted by Bryan on 9/02/09 • Categorized as Websites

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Editor's Note: I recently wrote a post about using a pre-made content management system vs. building one from the ground up (link). Madison McCord represents a different perspective on the debate. I asked him to share his thoughts on the blog. What follows are his thoughts.

It is safe to say that the landscape of college media has changed. Collegiate journalists are turning in their pencil and notepad for voice recorders and laptops. The reason for this change, a nationwide move to a web-first college news landscape.

Though the extinction of the classic college newspaper model of print first is coming soon, some college news organizations are still stuck in the starting gates when it comes to transitioning onto the World Wide Web. My suggestion to those organizations, or even those newspapers looking to revamp their online presence: Build your site using hand-coded HTML.

I know that the Content Management System (CMS) diehards will have jumped all over the comment boards by now, but it is important to understand my reasoning for supporting a hand-coded HTML-based Web site.

I am the web editor and co-designer of The Communicator Online, the student-ran news site at Spokane Falls Community College. This April, myself and our graphics editor, Marshall Moore, sat in our newsroom and – using a combination of TextEdit and Dreamweaver – built our Web site from the ground up, using no CMS. This means that when there is an update that needs to be made, or a new story that needs to be added, a staff member needs to open the .html page and make the changes by hand. This is a tedious process, but one that is vital to learning and understanding web design and management.

Before building the site, we had the discussion with our adviser about whether to look into using a CMS like WordPress or College Publisher to build the site, or to do it ourselves. Although the obvious answer was to use a CMS, it was also the easy answer. From this, our staff would learn nothing more than how to enter a story and headline into a form, and hit one button to have it magically appear on the site seconds later. What does a student learn from this? Nothing.

Yes, this gives the student more time to create a neat slideshow or tweet it to their followers, but if properly built, a hand-coded site offers you the same thing. What it does give the student that a CMS doesn't is the knowledge of building and managing a Web site by hand.

I mean, what is the argument here? If you are looking for the easiest way to post your stories and videos, then this is not for you. But if you believe in being a true student and learning the process of how something not only comes together but is also managed, then there is no discussion, building a hand-coded site is the only way to give you that experience.

Some consider hand-coded, static Web sites a "step back" in the industry, but those are the people that have only used a CMS. It all comes down to dedication and the willingness to learn. There is no difference between a great CMS site and a great hand-coded site.

I am in no way making the claim that any Web site built using a hand-coded HTML is better than any CMS site. That is determined by the sites content, not its framework. I am, however, claiming is that the editor who takes the time to learn and understand the workings of a hand-coded site may have more knowledge on the subject, knowledge that could play into a future career in journalism or any other field.

I know that our site is one of the few which still uses a hand-made HTML site, but I hope that others will look at what we have done, and realize that all it takes is a little extra effort to gain the extra knowledge.

Feel free to e-mail me at madison.j.mccord -at-gmail.com or follow me on Twitter @madison_mccord

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    • ^
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    Hand-coding vs. CMS
    bloggers today are likely to rely on CMS - simply coz it's faster if there are any errors it's easy to fix
    and most bloggers don't even know what html is, all they want is to write and earn out of it
    but then for programmers it would be such a great way on improving the experience of coding and code more closely study the codes behind CMS
    basically just a matter of who is using
    • ^
    • v
    There is no doubt that hand coding gives the basic experience, every website owner should know it by now but also we can't deny the huge benefits of content management systems. So I don't think we should ever chose between hand coding and cms, we should have them both.
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    In response to your article as a whole, I would say that the best compromise here IMHO is a combination: hand code your newspaper's very own unique content management system.

    A content management system is not the opposite of writing static HTML, it's more like a layer of control sitting atop static html files. Pure static "coding" of HTML can be done inside Wordpress. When writing a post in WP I can switch between the rich text editor and the plain text editor as I am typing. I can insert my own inline CSS. I can edit the style sheets, etc etc. I could write the entire post using only the plain text editor.

    You could write each news article using a plain text editor and do the HTML manually - then just design a simple management system that takes each file and lists them by date or by length or whatever. A content management system is a back end for manipulating doing stuff with your content.

    It almost seems like you mean to say you prefer maintaining and entire news website using no PHP, no putting content / data into databases, no Javascript/AJAX, or anything. Only pure HTML/CSS - My personal opinion being that's utterly insane as your # of articles, etc grows and grows.

    So am I not reading you right? I definitely think it'd be helpful for journalist to understand a little bit of the back ends things too, if that's what you mean. But really... software engineering can get very complex especially when you have a website that relies on Javascript/AJAX, PHP/Python/Perl, MySQL or Postgre, HTML, CSS and Apache all at once like some giant cluster fuck. It's probably best to keep a programmer on board. I think it would probably be better for your journalists to be able to spend time learning all about web analytics and analyzing traffic. This is really more comparable to converting analog journalism to digital journalism.

    Couple other small points:

    >> There is no difference between a great CMS site and a great hand-coded site.

    Over generalization and ambiguous.

    Also I don't recommend Wordpress for news sites. I think they end up looking awful. I see a lot of hyperlocal news sites try to look legit but they just like this half-blog half-news-site-with-down-syndrome configuration. Have some balls and get drupal, joomla, or contract a programmer. Wordpress is for blogs. If you have to hack it so much just to make it look like something else...
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    I like your story, I read the whole thing and have to agree with almost everything your saying...

    I have been hand coding Html, Xhtml, Javascript and Php for over 4 years now
    Its way better to get to know everything that's going on behind scenes.

    CMS is just a quick easy way out of things... but takes longer in the long run :*)
    • ^
    • v
    Having a news site isn't that bad, for as we all know more and ore people are getting hooked up with the world wide web
    • ^
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    Reply to (panini)

    Yup your right with today's technology and economy i bet lots of people are looking
    into ways of making money online from home.

    Especially since all the jobs are being replaced by programs and such...
    • ^
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    I understand the attraction of both sides. One option might be to make the back-end, where the journalists submit stories and copy editing is done, a CMS, allowing those who may not require as much HTML skill as others to submit and edit stories without having to worry about hand-coding. Then the front page of the site is a static HTML site, which is edited consistently, but also updated by pulling in RSS.

    We did something like that for the first version of Mason Votes and it worked out great, allowing us the amount of control we wanted on the front page while allowing folks to easily submit stories online.
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    For a smaller paper I suppose that's all well and good. Hand-coding definitely provides needed experience, but you should realize at some point you're just going through motions that a bit of code could hammer out much faster and more efficiently. Once you know HTML back and forth (and really, there's not a hell of a lot to know), it's time to move on and figure out how a more advanced system can save you time and provide the same (or better) results.

    Your process probably goes something like: Find old article summary on main page, swap out image with new article image, swap out summary with new article summary, change link to new article link. Open a new document, paste in skeleton/template article code, fill in relevant parts with article text, add image if necessary, save and upload. Go back to front page, and repeat ad nauseum with every article.

    In a CMS, this all gets automated. To your specifications, if the CMS is good/flexible enough. You just have to take the time out to customize your system.

    "Some consider hand-coded, static Web sites a "step back" in the industry, but those are the people that have only used a CMS. It all comes down to dedication and the willingness to learn. There is no difference between a great CMS site and a great hand-coded site."

    As someone who's hand-coded many sites, used WYSIWYG editors, used pre-built CMS solutions and themes, worked with the World's Worst CMS, rolled their own in ExpressonEngine and built entire database-backed sites using Django, I can honestly say that I prefer a managed solution. Even that awful CMS I refuse to name.

    As long as you have a solid foundation of each part that goes into it -- how the templates (HTML), code and database interact to provide you with exactly what you would have hand-coded -- you're much better off. You can take the time you would have spent manually doing everything and focus on adding new features that probably wouldn't have been possible with raw HTML, instead of spending all of your time just to keep the site updated.
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    Thanks for the comment,

    I do understand the ease of a CMS, but the way we have set up our system, we can update our site as fast as a CMS site can.

    You are basically correct on how we update our site, but all of that is trimmed down in time due to the efficiency of our system and the number of staffers who have the ability to do it.

    This is the type of comment I expected from this post, and I appreciate you reading and commenting on it.

    As I said, I know that our site is one of the few that doesn't use any type of a CMS, but that hasn't held us back. Due to the hard work ethic of our staff, we have produced a very good website (a 2009 Associated Collegiate Press Online Pacemaker Finalist, and probably one of if not the only one not using a CMS)

    I am interested in the things you are speaking of when you say, "adding new features that probably wouldn't have been possible with raw HTML." what are these features?

    -Madison
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    RSS/JSON feeds, archives, automatically generated related story links, comments hosted on your own server, etc, etc. The list expands somewhat if you let users have accounts and personalize things, but I've never been sold on the value (to the reader) in having accounts on news sites.

    Obviously you could do these things (minus comments on your own server) by hand-coding, but it would take up a lot of time rather than just happening automatically.

    That's just on the CMS side; you could also put the time into teaching people to create databases, charts, soundslides, etc.

    Of course, you're in a unique position among news sites where you're not publishing multiple times per week, and apparently you've got everyone pitching in, so while you have the time, manpower and inclination to do this, most other organizations don't. You also seem to be unique in that your main goal, as you stated to Greg, is to teach the staff HTML. In which case, code on.
    • ^
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    Hi Madison,

    I think your underlying ideas are spot on, but I don't think a news site is the best outlet to achieve those goals for your average student media staffer.

    Choosing a static HTML site over a CMS for a college newspaper for the reasons listed above, to me, is somewhat saying you care more about teaching your journalists than serving the community best through the enhanced abilities of a CMS and time permitted from not worrying about adding

    tags or that a story doesn't break the homepage in an important breaking news situation, which is much less likely with a CMS.

    Yes, college media is a teaching tool for young journalists, but I think having them focus more on the technology than their core mission of informing and serving their audience is too big a compromise.

    As a solution, I'd recommend they learn those skills through creating their own personal sites or doing other HTML/CSS work for friends, local companies, etc.

    I really appreciate your perspective and insights on this. Anyone who challenges the conventional wisdom of college media (and news media in general) deserves a big thumbs up.

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    Greg

    As I said in the blog. I do understand the simplicity and ease of a good CMS, and I realize that for larger media outlets, it is a necessity. But for the weekly or even bi-weekly newspapers that cover a large part of the market, I feel that there is no difference. Yes, hand-coding does take more time, but you can do everything a CMS does for you while hand-coding, it's just a matter of knowledge and the process of learning it.

    Never in this post did I address the fact that we care more about teaching than we do serving our audience. That is what we are trying to teach. As I said, it takes a strong staff work ethic to be able to pull off a HTML based site. If you knew our staff, the second something happens (breaking) the story goes through the same journalistic process that a CMS based site would do, but instead of putting it into a form, we place it into an HTML page and upload. This takes 1-2 minutes more, at most. We are still giving our readers the same quality product at the same speed (if anything 1-2 minutes more) and for a college newspaper, thats not that much.

    I know it seems like something that is outdated, but as you can see. We are able to do the exact same things a CMS based site can do in the same time. All with the goal in mind to teach the staff and serve the reader.

    -Madison
    Btw: Thanks for the Twitter follow :)
    • ^
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    I agree that as a learning thing for a low-volume site, having people roll the HTML is a pretty good way of doing it, because then when they eventually do use a CMS, they'll be able to figure out what's going on under the hood.
 

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