I can smell your CMS

A presentation at Fronteers Conference in in Amsterdam, Netherlands by Phil Hawksworth

The word is getting out. Great web site experiences require careful development and crafty execution in the front end. Squeezing every drop of performance out of your user's browser is tough, but Steve Souders and friends have mobilized an army, and we are all having a bloody good go.

But there is a common threat to doing great work in the front-end. It lurks in the back-end and clients love it. It's the content management system, and more often than not, it stinks.

We'll look at examples of the damaging traces CMSs leave behind in the front-end and at how we might work to reduce them. We'll find ways to fight for what matters in a CMS, and ways to avoid the smell of your CMS wafting over to the user and sacrificing the craftsmanship of good front-end engineering.

Video