Taking the Easy Way Out

Earlier this week I had a conversation with a colleague where he expressed his concerns over the organization of his faculty website.  All of the content on his site requires a lot of time to manage when he wishes to add new links or reorganize the formatting of the site.

The problem is that this individual was stuck in the old ways of building a standard website.  With all of the Web 2.0 tools available, we can now publish our content in so many forms that we should no longer have to manage our own content using HTML.  In my site I am able to share links with people using my Delicious account and share my instructional videos through my YouTube account.  I also share insight (or lack of insight sometime) through this blog, and my photos through my Flickr account.

Rather than placing all of this content on a standard HTML page, I simply use the landing page concept where I provide a short list of links to these various Web 2.0 sources.  This results in a simple and easy to use site eliminating the need for maintenance.  The exception to model in my current site is that I have a second page that includes a list of my presentations and publications.  However, I can replace this manual page with a link to my Delicious account using a specific tag where the URL points to my account with the tagged presentations.  I'll have to give this a try so I will no longer have to worry about formatting my presentation and publication page.