In the good old days, we developed web sites at the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) with whatever tool was available: FrontPage, Word, NotePad. There was no standard look and feel, and pretty much every crazy web doodad was fair game for decorating your pages. Of course, half of the pages ended up either butt-ugly or broken, but you could get really creative, and the sky was the limit.

A few years ago, big thinkers in management decided to enforce standards for agency web sites throughout the Department. Shortly thereafter, the Department settled upon a common Web Content Management System (WCMS) that would (theoretically) help agencies implement the complex design.

A problem for FAS was that what the WCMS published was piles and piles of obscurely named and unstyled XML files that were unmanageable by themselves.

FASLinks is an ASP.NET application that catalogs and tracks the relationships between the XML files that the WCMS publishes. Its functions include associating a web page title and description with each XML file and establishing the position of each file in the hierarchy of the web site for the purpose of building the “breadcrumb” menu that appears at the top of every web page. It also tracks right navigation links that optionally appear in pages. The data is maintained in a SQL Server 2005 database. The web application itself was developed in Visual Studio 2005.

For a long time, I resisted the Department’s mandated design. I hated it, and I was vocal about it. But since our own web site now follows a similar design paradigm, I guess I should stop whining.