Q: Given the nature of our business, its a bit embarrassing to have customers / companies we work with trying to navigate our site. Our current Update system includes hand-editing Dreamweaver template generated pages. It would be nice to have a clean interface to add or change elements that a professional looking front.
While we have some fairly strong technical / programming skills, none of us manufactures are extremely well versed in designing web pages – and we are currently flooded. We have discussed this bike, but one major concern is capable of maintenance once theyre gone. The person will be responsible for this also plays the role of our audit, so we need to be easily use.
Features we would have:
News section, with optional RSS feed
Project description pages
Video demos of technologies (embedded w / in pages )
Staff description, please contact information
Any personalized recommendations? Ive checked OpenSourceCMS (http://www.opensourcecms.com/), there is much to choose from. We already have a collaboration / groupware site running, and want to separate (and lightweight to keep). I would expect something Tiki-ish, but a colleague has a strong aversion to the inconsistencies within syntax Tiki. TIA.
Best Answer: WordPress.
Yahoo! offer it as part of their hosting packages.
Web Design Business Startup Kit
Re:Thanks for the pointer. We've got a bit on our plate right now, and were considering farming this task out. Perhaps a custom system would be best, given our specific (and fairly limited) criteria.
Html Tutorials In Web Page Design.
Re:You know for your needs you may want to consider a custom CMS. I have developed tons of websites over the years and tried a lot of different CMS systems for my clients. Bottom line is that they are quirky and they offer too many features for what the client really needs. In the end it becomes an administrative nightmare to update what amounts to just some text that changes a lot.
In your case you are talking about basically edited the text of a few pages and then adding some links to videos that you upload. This is a very small amount of information that is changing, and you are not talking about changing the structure of the site.
My recommendation would be to develop a custom CMS for those sections you want to update frequently. Use a database backend to store the content and then bind to it on the front end to display it. The general rules of thumb I give my clients is that anything you want to update at least once a month should be part of the CMS.
At the end of the day the custom CMS will give you exactly what you want, will conform to your design (just use flat textboxes to allow content input and style it using CSS for display) and be much less of an administrative nightmare. This solution also allows you to give ownership of updating the content to marketing or business users because they can't screw up the site.
Web Design Mastery – Professional Web Site Design Made Easy
Re:Thanks for that suggestion. Joomla looks nice, and the RSS feed was a feature someone mentioned during the meeting, more of a nice-to-have than a hard constraint.
Starting a Web Design Business
Re:I've always preferred Joomla. Very easy to use, and can do all the things you want….however I'm not 100% on the RSS feed. You could also spend very little money to get a 3-month subscription to rocketthemes.com. I think it's around $35, and you'll get a whole past library of their fantastic themes to fit your business. That is, if you don't want to make your own.
If you'd like, I can provide you a couple of links via PM to my own personal sites that use Joomla and themes from the rockettheme site so you can take a peek at what they look like in the real world.
Web Design Documentation Pack
Re:Thanks for the suggestion – I'll bring the application up. I'm likely the one who will be tasked with implementing whatever solution they decide on, and it does look highly configurable.
Pitch Magic: Drag and Drop Pitch Page Creation
Re:http://www.dotnetnuke.com/ is super powerful and can do a lot of things…a couple books have been written on it even. It might take a bit to get setup though so not sute if you want to go that far but its a decent solution.
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