This is probably a result of spending a bunch of time putting together a project site using Expression Engine this week, but it’s really hitting me how I really don’t think of a web site as a collection of “pages” any longer.  There’s just no such thing as a “page” in Expression Engine, or many other Content Management Applications.

Here are a few challenges I’m seeing in getting rid of the “page” in day to day web work:

- If you take away the page as a container of a “chunk of content”, what are you left with to call that chunk?  I’ve been using the blog notion of a “post”, but I’m not sure that reasonates with non-bloggers.

- Many pricing schemes revolve around the number of pages to a site.  While I prefer using hour estimates, will potential customers be able to put a value on a proposal that doesn’t use pages as a web “unit of measure”?

- Without pages, do site maps make sense?

- How can we better develop navigational schemes that accomodate a more dynamic and granularized content structure?  There gets to be a point where many navigation bars just won’t accomodate more links, and customers shouldn’t have to pay for navigation redesign just because they want to add the one more chunk that outgrows the menu.

- Do people grasp content that appears in more than one section of a site?  With Expression Engine, for example, I can assign a post to be both a “file” and a “message” (content types that I’ve created).  It will appear in both lists, but will that confuse people who are using to thinking about “pages” that “live” somewhere in the navigation?

- How is this abstraction of content best communicated to non web-heads?