This afternoon, an older relative of mine stopped by the house to coerce me into helping fix his company's website. Consequently, I have a viscerally renewed appreciation of the urgent need for intelligent web content management software.

He and his wife run a salon/spa in New Jersey. Their website was built a few years back by a frat-brother of his son-in-law. It's woefully out-of-date and awkwardly-constructed. Edits are made through a weird web-based file-management-and-wysiwyg thing, so just making basic basic adjustments is painfully tedious.

I am a little overwhelmed with this guy's willingness to jump headfirst into a completely bewildering medium. He listened intently and took several pages of notes while I explained things like the difference between editable text and fonted graphics, how to resize and replace an image, why changing a phrase's text-color to blue does not automatically turn that phrase into a link, how RGB hexcodes work, and why the page looks completely different in the wysiwyg editor than it does in the actual web-browser.

As we were finishing up, he summarized for me: "It's not easy for folks of my generation to understand this stuff. But what's frustrating for me is when I have instructions that say 'Do A then B then C, and then a window will pop up that says X,' but when I do those things no window pops up at all! Something completely different happens! And I do not have the intuitive understanding of things to know what to do next. I'm completely lost."

I had to correct him that, conventional wisdom aside, this is not a generational issue. If your instructions say something will happen, it ought to freaking happen, regardless of how old you are. And updating a basic ordinary brochure-style website should not require photoshop expertise or knowledge of RGB hexcodes.

Come on people, it's 2007, why haven't we got this problem licked yet?