Good to know we’re doing something right

After having recently attended the 2007 Cascade Server Users Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, I'm a bit up in arms about whether or not I'll go next year. The reason being, I didn't really feel like I learned anything new. That's not to say that going was completely unnecessary. I made contacts with other users who were doing great things that I'm sure to attempt implementing and I also gave quite a few people advice I would have died for when we began our Content Management sojourn almost two years ago. Those things include:

• Web standards!!!!! (yes, with 5 exclamation points) - Get with it. Tables-based sites are the way of the distant past. If you're not coding in XHTML and CSS you are a part of that distant past. I was floored to see that people are still designing with tables at the user conference. The headaches you have learning and implementing with CSS now will save you CMS headaches for the rest of eternity later.
• Strategic planning - A few hours of information architecture, site structuring, usability testing, etc. will save you tons of hours later in retrofit and shoe horning. When designing a site, you should always take the time to decide who you're making the site for and how best to organize your site in terms of directory structure, not just navigational structure. They go hand-in-hand if you hadn't noticed. If you dive headfirst into an organically designed folder hierarchy, your breadcrumbs won't work, your navigation won't work, your indexing won't work...basically you'll be glad you planned.
• Usability with your CMS in mind - Not all Content Management Systems are created equal...and none of them are perfect. Not a single one will answer all your problems and sprinkle magical fairy dust over your life as a Web Developer. YOU STILL HAVE A JOB TO DO. So when you're putting your site into a CMS, take your system's strengths and weaknesses and run with or destroy them, respectively. That said, sometimes you have to simplify things to a point of mind-numbing simplicity to make it work the best. Our CMS gives us the ability to create all sorts of fancy dropdown menus and selectors on page edit screens, but in the long run, we've found that a simple text field works just as fine, if not better, when we stick an end user in front of it at a keyboard. Which leads me to...
• Just because you can doesn't mean you should - This is a tough one to accept. Case in point: Once we got our shiny new CMS solution up and running and sites were beginning to go in pretty easily we got entirely too focused on putting every site in the CMS. Some of the sites really didn't need to be in there and would function just as well in a database or even as simple HTML pages. It's easy to get excited and think that a CMS will be the solution to all of web life's problems, but you must take care to use the system as it is meant to be used. Again, shoehorns are for feet not web sites.