devil in a blue dress
Something that struck me while browsing content management systems this afternoon:
"The personalisation either of the graphical, or of the programming part has only a single limit, the fantasy and capability of the programmer and web designer.The presence of many PHP-Nuke sites similar to each other is due mainly to the lack of time of those who created them or the fear that the phase of personalisation is too difficult on a technical level. In fact, it suffices to let oneself be inspired by the available themes, in order to realize how easy it is to sew a new dress to one's portal." (from the
PHP-Nuke HOWTO)
Besides having the most amusing metaphor I've ever seen for creating a new theme/look/skin/style for a content management system, I think this quote brings up an interesting point. Most people who install content management systems or blogging/online journal systems don't modify the existing themes, or modify them only in superficial ways (changing the colors but not the overall layout, for example). This leads to a rather unintentionally uniform appearance. Why does this happen? Is it because people are satisfied with the defauls? Is it because there's a high learning curve in changing the defaults? Is it because people need to invest more time in actually publishing content than in fiddling with the details?
Posted by at May 25, 2004 04:06 PM
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