Sustainable Sites

  Ventura Files (http://www.venturafiles.com) is my favorite, not the least bit because I'm its editor. The site was up within a few days of the election and is still going strong today. With the exception of one competitor (http://www.jesseventura.com), most of the Jesse Ventura sites dried up within a few months. I believe the difference has a lot to do with the production systems used to operate the sites left standing.

As I suspect is the case for our major competitor, Ventura Files uses a back-end administration module written as components for ASP and SQL Server. Our content is inserted as a record into the database via password-protected HTML forms.

The display pages execute server-side functions and subroutines to manage multi-page display for the stories, preventing the kind of exhaustion experienced by hard driving coders working to keep static HTML sites lively.

With a clean and effective content management system, any site can be a pleasure to administer. Sites where the editor can take a step back from the code will always be more sustainable over even the short-haul than sites that are merely collections of static HTML documents.

by Aaron Osterby http://www.osterby.com