I think mentioning a few sites is useful. Let's take
Amazon.com
. This is an amazing website. It has some of the richest
dynamic content available. What the site presents to me
is not what it presents to someone with different
tastes in books, art, music, or whatever. But, amazingly enough
with all of this powerful marketing-oriented computation
going on, Amazon still remains very fast in page response
and the look of the pages is nice and tight and cozy.
So it is safe to say that 3 types of people are working in
the best form on synergy seen anywhere on the web today:
Web developers - they did it with Perl
Web designers - those nice tight pages with attractive buttons
and color schemes
Web content managers - the people who think up all the
neat "oh-gotta-click-there" things that spring out at you
at their website.
On the other hand, take
Etoys
Etoys, before its demise, was widely known as having
the strongest investment in Perl technology in
Southern California. They often had merlyn there for
instruction/consulting and they were the commercial
proof-of-concept for Template. And they too,
were at the forefront of marketing-driven dynamic content
generation. However, the weight was too heavy on technology.
The webpages at Etoys had lots of blank space all over the
place. The images looked like they were scanned from an old
newspaper. It was ugly.
Thus here the web developers did their job, but did not
engage in synergy with the designers and content managers.
I can't think of a site where the design is great but the
core computation is poor.
Heck, who needs web developers anyway? Yahoo doesn't support
web development for their webhosting. They say just
use
Mivascript
to do everything from forum building to guestbooks
to chat and more!