I am not one to believe that good designers will ever be out of a job. I do however believe that the attitude of the designer needs an adjustment. I’ve met entrepreneurs that have built entire websites and built successful businesses without an ounce of design school and zero technical background. They’ve put together a website and self sustaining business by sheer will power, using Photoshop and a CMS. I am always impressed by this when I see it.

They have been able to do this, because the internet and its underlying technology continue to forge toward an ever ubiquitous environment. Certainly all of these solutions that I have come across need major improvements in design, and it is really remarkable to hear these business owners at times announce that they won’t ever need a designer.

But still, they do have somewhat of a point. Their solutions are not that far away from quality, I’ve even seen some of them that only need a little design help. Yes you can see the glaringly obvious lack of a grid system, bad typography, and broken color rules – but only because they are unaware of these things. In a few more years these things will be common knowledge, indeed they may already be.

This means that design is becoming ever more of a utility proposition each day, and I fear for the designer whom needs a sexy high end project to be motivated. As a technologist by background, I’ve had plenty of 14 hour stints troubleshooting a problem that is ever elusive, often in a chilly raised floor data center huddling around a much too small to be effective console. The designer will need to understand that there will be days of simply designing side bars and boxes with gradients. It’s par for the course in today’s CMS driven world.

I imagine the designer looks at something like Drupal 6 and self built sites with stock themes and winces in pain – but I promise you they are soon to be surprised.

If I could have two wishes granted, I’d ask that business owners and executives realize that the targeted use of formally trained designers is essential, and to trust companies like Zemelo to keep these costs contained – but secondly, and most importantly, I’d ask designers to join communities like Drupal and advocate for good design, embracing the future as opposed to trying to ignore it.

Kirkland, Washington – August 28, 2008

Zemelo Corporationtoday announced that it has signed an exclusive partnership agreement with Wowrack , a leading provider of hosting services in Seattle, WA. to provide end-to-end Managed Drupal Services to new and existing clients.

“For agencies and freelancers for whom CMS has become a necessity, Drupal increasingly becomes the simple and obvious choice. We know from our own experience that web designers are struggling to deliver scalable CMS capability and social networking features on ever shrinking design budgets. We’ve heard of too many bad experiences around dynamic content and well researched use case suffering on delivery due to lack of investment in content management and hosting scalability. Today we’ve moved to ensure our clients will never experience this issue”, said Stephen White, VP and cofounder of Zemelo Corporation.

He added: “With this agreement, Zemelo has laid the foundation for a complete and comprehensive Drupal Hosting and Services solution for our clients and partners. Literally any internet community our customers and partners build will be able to scale, from small to large, and we are delighted to be in a position to provide this capability from the outset. We are equally delighted to be working closely with Wowrack on Drupal, whom bring an impressive hosting enterprise and a wonderfully streamlined business model to this venture. This is a big day for Zemelo Corporation and all of us here are very excited about the future.”

“Wowrack is proud to announce this partnership with Zemelo”, said Erward Osckar, VP and cofounder of Wowrack. “We believe that Wowrack will strengthen our position as a premier hosting provider in the Pacific Northwest by offering Drupal (CMS) solutions with Zemelo as our exclusive partner. Having operated as a small business since our inception, we understand the value of CMS driven web applications empowering users to deliver fast and rich content. We are excited to be playing a part in supporting the new and emerging open source CMS community and we believe that our partnership with Zemelo will fill in a much needed role in providing value added content management solutions.”

Zemelo Corporation is a full service creative agency with service offerings in both design and technology. For more information about Zemelo Corporation, contact Stephen White at stephen@zemelo.com.

“Social Networking” is simply a buzzword for the reality of today’s internet experience, and Drupal has emerged as the clear leader. The Drupal Community baked in social networking from day one, it will take other CMS years to bolt on functionality that is already in Drupal and already mature and optimized.

Internet community enabled sites need to be able to handle all kinds of traffic, they need to scale, they need to support new web technology easily and they need to be updated constantly, this means the CMS requires backend management, from qualified IT professionals. We all know that simply launching a site is not enought these days, the site needs content updates, and the client wants to do this without another design engagement. The client needs a partner, not just a designer.

“Web Hosting” is not a decision to be made lightly. Putting your website on a server that has hundreds of other sites and dozens of other applications running is really asking for trouble. Putting your website on a server that only gets attention when your site goes down, just does not cut it in 2008.

In the coming weeks, Zemelo will make a series of announcements around Drupal and around a strategy to provide best in class hosting to our clients as part of our engagement process. We’ve come from the IT space, and we know how to provide our customers with rock solid IT related services. When Carbon ships, we will be one of the first companies to support this in a hosted environment, almost immediately.

Web 2.0 is not just about design – it’s about what happens when your community grows. Is your designer talking to you about everything? Do you know everything you need to know about launching your Web 2.0 site? Is your CMS fully supported? Stay Tuned.