Sunday was Daylight Saving Time (DST) so we all went around and changed clocks back an hour. These days a lot of devices are smart enough to do it themselves – the PC, the cable box, the cellphones, even one of my house phones figured it out! Others still need to be changed – the clock on the stove, the office phone, the car radio. I’m sure those lists are different for each of you. But, did you remember your website?

Some websites run programs or software like WordPress, WSN Scripts, and many more. Some of those are smart enough to update themselves just like our devices at home. But, just like the stuff around your house, they should be checked to make sure all is well. So, have you checked your site to make sure it’s “on time!”

Any High Aspirations, Inc. client on maintenance need not worry as we’ve already done this for you. Anyone not currently on maintenance, just contact us and we’ll take care of it for you.

WebAsyst, the developers of Shop-Script, High Aspirations, Inc.’s online store of choice, are running a sale until September 30, 2011. All their products are discounted by 25%!

WebAsyst’s products are:

• Shop-Script: Establish your own online store and start selling online.
• Help Desk: The right application to handle communications with your customers.
• Files: Online file storage and sharing application.
• Photos: An easy way to upload photos and create your own photo gallery.
• Projects: Simple project management application.
• Contacts: Online contact management application.
• Mail: Two applications in one: web email client and email marketing.
• Issue Tracker: Issue and bug tracking with customizable workflow.
• Notes: Simple online notepad application.
• Pages: Service for publishing tutorials and user guides.

If any of our maintenance clients are interested in adding these products to their web sites, please let us know. If you aren’t under maintenance, just contact us and we’ll be happy to give you an estimate to do the project.

If you are a do-it-yourself kind of site owner, then feel free to use our Promo Code of 318864 when you order via the WebAsyst Site. Oh, and keep that Promo Code around because when the sale’s over, it’ll get you 5% off your order.

This is why WordPress is High Aspirations, Inc.’s blogging and content management software (CMS) of choice…

The Software is Wrong, Not the People
By Joe Flood, July 13, 2011

It was a small moment at the WordPress DC Meetup. One of the creators of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, was in town. He had come to this monthly meeting at Fathom Creative to learn what the local community wanted in the next version of his web publishing software.

The media library in WordPress was discussed. Mullenweg admitted that it is confusing and gets difficult to manage once you have lots of images in the library. A man in the audience brought up a technical issue he had with the library. Mullenweg explained that you could actually do what the man wanted to in WordPress but stated:

The software is wrong, not the people.

This is a revolutionary statement. Mullenweg could have just told the man that “you’re doing it wrong” before telling him the “right” way to work with WordPress. Instead, the fact that users had problems with the media library told him that the software needed to be improved.

It’s a contrary notion. We all adapt to clunky and ever-changing software, relearning the basic tasks needed to accomplish our work – where’d they move the print button?

And we cope with this increasing complexity without complaint. Because no one wants to look stupid. You can’t figure out the ribbon in Microsoft Word? You must be the idiot, not the software.

This is especially true in the world of content management systems for web sites. I’ve worked on large-scale web sites for more than a dozen years as a web editor, producer and site manager. I remember when we did things in HTML. I have fond memories for Claris HomePage. Compared to the complexity of managing a large site in Dreamweaver, a CMS seemed like a brilliant idea.

Be careful what you wish for. Over time, I’ve had the fortune/misfortune to use nearly every major CMS out there.

The simple publishing tools that we used back in the 90s “evolved” into massively complex structures requiring expensive experts to install and administer. CMS like SharePoint, Vignette and Percussion are punishing experiences for the user, turning the joyous task of writing into a machine-led death march. You enter your content and then engage in a series of database programming tasks, with the hope that at the end of it, if everything goes well, your article will appear in the correct format on the web site at the next publishing cycle.

It’s no wonder that there’s so much bad writing online when the publishing tools are so lousy.

WordPress is different. Being open-source, and closely tied to the community (would Steve Ballmer listen to your feedback?), it has a different philosophy – “The software is wrong, not the people.”

Of course, it’s not perfect – the media library definitely needs some work – but it’s easy to use and adaptable. WordPress now powers more than 50 million web sites.

And, most importantly of all, it’s software that people want to use. No one feels passionate about SharePoint. But they do about WordPress. This enthusiasm will lead to its greater adoption. Over time, the users will prevail.

The original article can be found at Joe Flood’s site. Thanks go to Joe Flood himself for the permission to republish!