Building a Stable foundation

Chances are, you association relies on technology for a lot more than just your website.  From member databases, to accounting tools, technology touches nearly all facets of how we manage our lives.  While all of this technology serves to make our lives easier, it represents a big problem.  According to an article published by The Atlantic, coding is so complex even programmers don’t understand all of what its doing.

With the promise of self driving cars on the horizon, this should be alarming.  How can we protect against something we don’t fully understand?  The solution is simple: make it simple.

There’s an idea that in order to be fully customized, and to get the most functionality out of your tech, the workings must be complex.  When building a custom CMS, many clients will request the ability to write custom HTML.  This can be problematic, even for people who are well versed in writing in code.  When you’re editing a single page, there’s more than that page you have to consider.  Will your code be compatible with the sites CSS?  Are all of the tags you’re using HTML5 compliant?  What about mobile integration?

With the increasing availability of tools that make editing easy, it’s time to ditch the idea that just because something is “easy” to use, doesn’t mean it’s not powerful.  Take Photoshop for example.  It uses powerful algorithms to manipulate photos, but provides an easy-ish to use interface.  It hides most of its complexity from the end user.  This doesn’t make Photoshop any less powerful; to the contrary, it enables its users to more easily utilize all of the programs power.

The allure to have complete control over your organizations technologies may seem like a necessity, but demanding the ability for staff to edit code may be weakening its foundation.  Tools that are designed to hide the actual coding don’t exist just to make editing “easier”, they’re also there to make sure your tech exists on a stable foundation.

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