In past decade with improvements in internet infrastructure and enhancement of internet browsers and advances in the web technologies, the web design and development industries have changed and no longer designing a website is as simple as designing a plain page with Microsoft Expression Web or Adobe Dreamweaver.
During the past couple of years we have seen incredible improvement in website designs thanks to HTML5 and CSS3 and of course creativity and hard work of the designers and developers in the web community. Nowadays, website design and development is not same as before and no one starts any web project from scratch as there are many frameworks, UI kits, and even ready to use Content Management Systems (CMS) out there which can be used easily. The website design and development is transformed from designing the front-end from an empty paper to ready to use UI kits and UI frameworks and the backend development from coding in notepad to just running installation.php.
The new modern website is all about integration with services, social networks and other websites. Most of modern websites somehow preferred to use other services and websites instead of developing the very same feature the other offers. For example, most of website due to high interactivity of social networks, they prefer to have the comment section provided by Facebook and Disqus. By using their comment plugin, no longer they have to be worried about handling the user data, comment data and even analytics and most importantly the maintenance.
These services and websites transformed the websites from heavy resource and high processing scripts to thin clients where it only display the information and all the data processing and analysis is happening on a cloud server or service.
Recently I’ve decided to design and develop a new website for group of gamers who already have their contents on the Wordpress online blog and couple of other social networks. After requirement analysis and consideration, I have decided to no to use any database technologies and not to develop or deploy any content management system. Instead, just read and parse the existing content from other websites and services and bring them together in one place. The same idea behind thin client mobile applications where it only contains the user interface (view) and logical process (controller) to process the data and display it.
At first, there was so many challenges which makes it quite impossible to achieve a full working website without using any database or content management system, but after doing some research and abit of creativity I was able to extract the blog post from Wordpress.com blog and photos from Instagram and bring it all together and add couple of more widgets and features like Disqus comment section, Google analytics to monitor and collect statistics for further analysis and finally adding the social sharing buttons to make it easier for visitors to share content on social media websites.
In future blog post I will explain how to develop a thin client website and bring content from other websites and services.
