Experience matters. As web-building techniques evolved from tables and transparent gifs to Flash splash screens, clients stayed the same. When Bootstrap faded and CSS Flexbox and Grid ascended, deadlines and deliverables remained unchanged.

Content management systems and templates are in widespread use for a simple reason. Hand-coded websites are time-consuming and expensive. This essay about knowing code isn't about eliminating those solutions. It's about maximizing them. If you know what's going on behind the drag-and-drop, you can leverage the advantages and minimize the limitations.

With some visual examples from a site that was thoroughly tweaked up inside a CMS, here are some advantages of having a writer who knows code.

It Makes You A Better Boss

Before I get into technology, I need to start with team dynamics. When working with writers, coders and designers, it's very helpful to have worked as a writer, coder and designer yourself.

With User-Generated Content, Mistakes Are Inevitable

Any system that's built for amateur users is going to have some funky moments. People are going to design things in Word or whatever and then come running when it blows up. That's not a big deal, but the quicker you can make fixes, the better.

Second, it's commonplace for companies to get locked into templates that overly limit what they can do. Those limitations need not be permanent. Tweaks are your friend, but you have to know what you're doing.

The answer to waiting for another department to make a change? Have a person who can make the change in minutes all by themselves.

Serious developers do not need unexpected site management nightmares. Tweakers like me have to know how to make things better without creating other issues. Inline code is great until it isn't. You never want to see one stylesheet change blow up every page with a hand-coded tweak.

That's where experience comes in. As the saying goes, an auto mechanic isn't making $75 an hour to turn a wrench. They are making $75 an hour because they know where to put that wrench.

The Need For A Human Bridge

Productive workplaces use collaborative teams. Designers who produce beautiful work aren't necessarily trained in creating something that will look the same rendered as a poster or a postcard. They may not be aware of usability or information architecture considerations in applying what they are doing to the web.

In most every job, I've been a better designer than anyone who knows more code than me, and I've known more code than anyone who's a better designer than me.

Front-end developers are trained in making things work, not making things pretty. You don't have to get stuck with something sub-optimal just because of lines on an org chart.

Because above all else there's the content, the interplay of what you're trying to say and how you are trying to say it. I've spent a career kayaking the whitewater between the marketing and the technical, the content and the code.

The two most common errors in CMS-built sites are a lack of extensibility and an inability to use the design in a way to gather data for optimization. When discussing changes, opinions are one thing. Data is another.

See The Big Picture

There are inherent silos when coordinating the messaging between advertising, direct mail, social media, web and email. Brand guidelines are only a start in the consistency of messaging.

There are lots of little efficiencies that can be achieved in production, and they all add up. The trick is having someone who knows how to spot them, particularly in image processing.

Back in the day we used to talk about "write once, publish everywhere." A lot of the technology behind that has changed, but the principle still applies. Doing it is the trick.

What's Possible Is Always Subject To Change

Being entirely self-taught in all things web, learning is constant. When I was worried I hadn't worked on WordPress in a while, I set up a server on my Mac and built a WP site for fun. Using the word "fun" in a sentence like that officially makes you a nerd.

In terms of staying current, I always wanted to stay within a two-week refresher bootcamp of working a straight-up developer job. After five years of coding nothing but emails, an odd coding niche based in '90s principles, I did just that. And it stretched to four weeks. And counting.

So many things are now possible in web coding, you'll see stories on sites for developers with headlines like this: "Is There Too Much CSS Now?" I felt incredibly relieved when the author of that piece, Sacha Greif, wrote this:

"Maybe we should drop the expectation that CSS developers have to know all of CSS?"

You don't need to know how many ways I could emphasize that quote. And you probably don't need to know what all this means...

.first span:nth-child(2n + 1) { property: value }

... to know that someone who does know might come in handy sometime.

Especially if they can rock the Adobe Creative Suite, too.

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