Fuck, (I can say that here, it’s my goddamn blog!). No shitstorm underway, just a tiresome project at work that has long worn out its welcome as far as my tenure at the CGS is concerned. A week late from the original launch date. The site is only 40% populated.
The final straw came today when the project lead at FireAnt Studios actually said that information was left out because of design. Form trumping content, for a scientific website. No way. The design team definitely didn’t understand our mission. I feel guilty for not riding this problem from the initiation — but really didn’t begin to pick up its scope until I had the WP staging instance in my hands. Once I started to move around and deploy the information architecture, I began to see how the designers fell flat ensuring the site could be implemented information-dense at the same time as making it a contemporary-looking site. I suspect that a studio like FireAnt is primarily aimed at clients who are selling products, not proffering information.
One of the primary drivers of the mess is the layered complexity of deploying a site via WP (or any other CMS). This is combined with the ever-increasing complexity of the entire IT ecosystem. It is the same complexity that expands CO2 production: complexity is correlated with energy consumption (to maintain the complexity). Back to the old rules of thermodynamics. We’re fucked.