Must Design

Everything New Is Old
This post from  Smashing Magazine is prescient and nostalgic at the same time. Prescient in its prediction that we are about to make websites flatter and easier to code. Nostalgic because I've been pressing the STATIC button for years now. 

Because you CAN do something doesn't mean it is the right thing to do. Search spiders have NEVER been as good crawling dynamic pages as static (I don't care what anyone says). As a Director of Ecommerce my question was, "Why do we NEED that to be dynamic?" 

Our CMS was.Net, a platform WE DO NOT recommend since you need LOTS of programming resources and ASP.Net fights SEO like a sumo wrestler.  Just because we COULD make something dynamic meant it should be dynamic (to our IT team). 

I'm a marketing guy and a publisher (at heart). That means I want pages that I can easily manipulate AND let our customers easily manipulate. Wordpress seemed to offer just such a platform.

And then the hackers came and WP's weaknesses became painful (as the Smashing Magazine post shares). On the phone with my friend and the CEO of WTE.net the other day (Eric) I heard an interesting thing - PCI compliance was going to require any site with a form (and that wold be all sites) to be secure (HTTPS instead of HTTP).

The ability of hackers to exploit cracks meant security was about to be pushed across the entire site, not just the cart. To secure the cart credit card companies are insisting ALL user data be secure or PCI is void and your site can't take credit cards.  

So FLAT and SECURE is the future of e-commerce and everything new is old and vice versa.