I have been working as project manager to help build a website for a local school. There have been various difficulties, not least the obsession by some to send any if not all content in word documents.

Your in the supermarket you buy some stuff, it goes in a bag….but hang on, the bag cost 5p. Hmmm maybe I won’t take that bag after all. I think microsoft need to levy a similar charge when people reach for the word icon. They should probably be charged a £1 when using the medium exculsively for pictures… Just to cover network costs.

But why this obsession. Word files are no different to standard files. Why can’t the individual Jpg or gif be attached to an email. There must be ecameras, probably Kodak easyshare ones, that take pictures directly into word? Or perhaps on some PCs, notably those bought at supermarkets, Word is the default operating system. Fuck windows… All you need is the ability to make things bold, change text to comic sans ms and do a word count every 10 mins or so.

Sending pictures aside, surely when sending an email you write hello. Seems sensible to throw the rest of the content in there. The internet is not some sprawling word document tied together by dodgy tabs and misaligned paragraphs.

Anyway I have most of the content now but have all sorts of ideas to incorporate this habit into perhaps a key feature of the site. I could design the site entirely in Word and link the main URL to it so that the download starts straight away. It would time out half way through because of the file size exceeding the browsers buffer.

At some point some training will be necessary. I fear that the concept of a complex CMS may be too much. Today I connected excel directly to a mySQL database through ODBC. If the same could be done in Word to CMSmadesimple then I think they would be sorted. In fact, what started as a ridiculous post may have some merit after all.