[Sigia-l] Web browser based diagramming

[Eric Scheid]

On 28/3/06 10:33 AM, "Stewart Dean" <stew8dean at hotmail.com> wrote:

> I'm not going to be able to explain this to you but the way I see it you are
> the one doing things the long winded way. You can build someting bit by bit
> or you can treat it as a whole with the flows and structure effectivley
> automating much of it

One project I was involved in, back in my coding days, involved the designer
drawing pretty expressions of what the interface looked like which I then
coded into pages. This was back before dreamweaver and the like, so he
needed some code geek to physically make the site. Today with Expression etc
he could go ahead and do it all himself.

Which sounds great ... but this project didn't have a site map worked out
before hand. No gap analysis of the content was available. Some of the
designs were premised on the subject matter (photography courses) being
arranged into skill levels - beginner, hobbyist, master classes. Meanwhile,
some of the other instances of the same subject matter was arranged
according to topic area (urban, nature, etc). There was a third arrangement
of which I forget the detail, maybe it was based on streams. None of these
arrangements were fully fleshed out (so no faceted approach was possible),
and the client only wanted to pay for one arrangement. Even the list of
courses wasn't finalised because the client hadn't decided who he wanted as
instructors (some were real prima donnas, apparently). Knock out one or two
instructors who specialised in certain course groups and one or another of
those arrangements became nonsensical.

Trying to put the site together bit by bit, with each day more chunks of
content arriving ... that was the day I learned the value of mapping out the
site up front and working out what navigation scheme will fit the
organisation.

That was a mainly information based site. I've got similar horror stories
about applications developed without planning - all sorts of relationship
cardinality problems, scaling rates issues, circular references in
workflows, and more. Blech.

e.