A History of Web Content & Confucianism

"Study the Past if You Would Divine the Future"


Confucius would say: The Internet is a Big Deal. And Big Deals Change, but then return to whence they came.

Or something like that.

The Internet has been “around” now for several decades. We can trace its beginning to when Tim Berners-Lee “invented” it (and no, Al Gore was not in the room), but the Internet didn’t start doing anything until 1991.

That's when the first web page went live. Hardly anyone noticed, since if you were on-line at all it was through a company like Compuserve or America Online, but the Internet was starting. What went on line was simple, though: the pages all looked the same, with either left or center alignment throughout, and a single column of text formatted in one font with a few different sizes for emphasis.

A few years later, we had tables, which originally were designed for presenting data in rows of the same ugly text. But them something amazing happened: people commandeered the tables for formatting how you saw things in addition to what you saw, and then CSS (bye-bye tables) came along, and that idea for consistent presentation was adopted by the pretty police, too.

It was a short jump to limited interactivity. First we had Javascript, which when combined with CSS became Dynamic HTML. But at the same time there were problems between different browsers as we all started noticing that Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari didn't do quite the same thing.

Then e-Commerce came along. Site management tools. Software to make creating web pages easy. Everything was exploding by the year 2000, and over the last ten years all the tools, all the technologies, and huge changes in the way people do business evolved into what we have today:

Everyone is a web publisher.

But all the tools and all the ancillary ideas that the tools have created (or is it the other way around?) haven't made this any simpler. "Site Management" has become "Content Management", and while it's more precise, it's also more involved. Distribution of your information is important, too; not everyone who wants to hear what you have to say wants to take the step of coming to your web site, and many people who do so are using SmartPhones with tiny screens. We have blogging, Social Networking, and now the dreaded Search Engine Optimization. Yikes.

So the future is based on the past, and while we all might like to think that we're creating cool new stuff the point of all these tools remains getting your information in front of your clients. A simple task, made far more complicated by technology.

At CDLLC, we manage the technology for you. We know the past, and can future-proof your web/business needs. We use (for example—here's one more piece of "progress")—database-driven web sites separated from your content to make redesigns easy.

You become a content editor, not a programmer. We do everything else.

Because even as things get harder and harder, easy still matters.

-Crockett Dunn
Owner CDLLC

-Jeff Yablon
Chief Operating Office, CDLLC
President
Answer Guy Central Business Support Services