In days gone by, the five-pager was the mainstay of the web design business – Home, About us, Services, Testimonials, and Contact us. Like an online brochure, it provided small businesses with an online presence, and it provided their customers with the bare minimum of interaction.

At work, we recently took the decision that we weren’t going to do them any more. Just about every customer wants to manage their own content – which is their right – as a bare minimum. Many want blogs, feeds, fora, interactive maps, and other widgets.

The good news is that there are many pieces of open source software that make such requests simple, even trivial. WordPress divides opinion as a CMS, but I’ve found that with plugins like cforms and this sitemap generator make development speedy and simple.

Most CMS worth their salt produce valid (x)html, so there’s really no reason not to offer the customer these functionalities any more – join me in ditching the five pager as a dinosaur from the past!