The Need for Administrative Interface

By Brandon Savage on August 20, 2008

Out Of Date Warning

Languages change. Perspectives are different. Ideas move on. This article was published on August 20, 2008 which is more than two years ago. It may be out of date. You should verify that technical information in this article is still current before relying upon it for your own purposes.

Quick – you have a tight budget and you need to save money. What do you cut? If you said the admin interface, you are like many clients I’ve had but strangely, you’d still be wrong.

Lots of people figure that the public facing portion of the website is the most important. And for the most part, they’d be right. The public facing portion should be clean, streamlined, and intuitive. But forgetting the administration interface is like having a sleek sportscar with absolutely no controls. Wouldn’t make much sense, would it?

The administrative interface of any website is the steering wheel that drives the site. The sheer cost of creating the interface is far less than the total cost over time of asking a developer to update content each time you wish to change it.

I’ve had a number of clients who opted not to build administrative interfaces, opting for the lower out-of-the-box cost. What they came to realize was that the higher administrative costs were the trade off they faced by their decision.

When building something as critical and expensive as a full website, it is critical too that there be investment into the infrastructure for maintaining it. Anything less is simply throwing good money after bad; the cost may be lower at the front end, but later on down the road the cost will be astronomical.