This web design madness has to stop!

Adobe has launched Muse, declaring that no-one will be coding websites in 10 years time. This has met with howls from many in the web development community, all of them handcoders and doubtless quaking in their developy boots, fearful for their jobs.

Let’s have a look at the code:

Adobe Muse homepage code musings

Ow. So much for semantic, clean, well-structured HTML.

But does it matter? Well, yes. It is a nightmare to update and configure (I know, I had to clean up an Artiseer-designed Joomla! theme a couple of years ago). And the code is not portable.

We are in an age of progressive enhancement, where you take the same web page and view it on mobile devices, desktop browsers, steering wheels, whatever. Muse appears to be a step backwards, to One Fixed Desktop Layout.

But the intention of making websites easier to create is on the mark.

For example, here’s a simplified process of a current website project:

1. Brief written in Word.
2. Wireframes created in Pencil.
3. Mockups created in Photoshop.
4. Copy written in Word.
5. Select images sliced with GIMP.
6. HTML/CSS/JavaScript & theme written in Geany.
7. Website constructed with WordPress.

As a process, this sucks. There is so much duplication of effort: the planning, design and build are occupying totally separate rooms in an oddly dysfunctional household. It’s not so much that these are separate disciplines, rather that the communication between them is pretty abysmal.

Many McWeb developers swear by Coda, the text editor flavour of the month, because (apparently) it combines a text editor, FTP client, Subversion client, terminal and reference all in one window.

Is it a pipe dream to have a similar approach to the web design process? Or are the constituent disciplines of web design simply too separate?