What CMS?

Throughout my website development for new clients, more and more are asking for a CMS solution of sorts which will allow them to update the content to the webpages themselves. Fair enough in my opinion, it works in two ways - firstly my clients get to update their website free of charge without having to pay me; and secondly it means I don't have to get bombard every two weeks to do the tedious work of updating sentences throughout their pages.

So, I started looking for a simple solution to get things rolling. The lastest website I built was for a new start-up company Ekland - Solar Panel Specialists in Devon which required a CMS solution. Here's what I found:

Cushy CMS www.cushycms.com/
A clean, intuitive, and friendly website that allows you to update your website effortlessly using their online app. Just add their class name to the div's or sections you want to be editable and bingo! edit away. Only slight concern I had with this website was that you had to store your FTP details with them for your users to be able to come back later and update the content - something that I didn't feel comfortable in doing unfortunately - especially as it says that any hacking of user information to obtain the FTP details is not their fault.....

KompoZer www.kompozer.net/
Played around with this for about an hour and found this to be a really good bit of kit. Ok, looking a little dated now that we're all on Windows 7, but the functionality is there. Download the application, connect to your FTP and you're away. You can easily open the HTML files in a visual editor which makes it very easy to see what you're editing. Plus there is a HTML view; which I feel will become useful if I ever have to debug what a client has done wrong.

Joomla
And finally, Joomla! It's an obvious solution these days - lots of templates out there and apparently easy to edit/update. By modularising the components (header/footer) you only have to change the module itself for the changes to be reflected across all pages of your website. In my latest project I unfortunately didn't have time to sit down and learn how Joomla works, but for my next project I will certainly be doing so.

In summary, for a simple WYSIWYG editor that you can trust (he says shly) I'd use KompoZer; but moving forward - if you can spare the time to learn how Joomla works it's going to pay dividends. I've created my own custom CMS packages for clients before in .NET - never again I feel!!

Hello one and all! Apologies for such a delay in posts, work has been hectic of late. Just pushed out two websites in the past month, and currently beavering away at another for a new Solar PV Installation company - exciting stuff!!

Although it's all good fun creating new websites for people all the time, I think it's necessary to sometimes take stock and adjust your work-social balance. I've got a full-time 9-5 job as a software developer, and work doing freelance website development in Exeter in my free time. This said, boundaries often blur in terms of having some time off. Yesterday for example, I worked 9am - 6:30pm at work, got home, made my girlfriend dinner, then worked from 8pm-11:30pm; a little too much I'd hope you'd agree.

If I'm not careful this is an on-going process for me, and I'll work 4 hours a night every night of the week - and crash on the weekends wanting to do nothing but sleep. So today, I've taken stock and decided to put in place a little routine for forthcoming projects - maximum 2 evenings a week freelance development time, maximum 3hours at a time. I love to be able to get back to customers asap, and deliver results before they've even finished their question but I think now that I've built an established client base that trusts me they'd be happy to wait a few days for the work to be done - surely!!

Anyway, my 2 cents - make sure you don't burn the candle at both ends. Doing freelance work should be an enjoyable alternative to the real grind. Don't make the mistake of making it your life and turning you into a working bore.

Ta, ta!

Background Patterns & Textures for your website

I was thinking the other day, when creating a mock-up website for a client, wouldn't it be good if there was a resource to get background images for your webpages. Why this question hadn't occured to me before I don't know, but generally I make websites with quite a simple background - a gradiented gif or some such. I've always thought it best to have something small which can be repeated rather than try and make the client render a huge image.

Well needless to say, I quickly managed to find some great resources for background images. My top 3 are:

Brusheezy
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Everyday Icons
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Alice Grafixx
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Check out the website I created for Lauren Hagger - an artist based in the Devon. For this website I used one of these free background images.

i-Pads, Shy-Pads

So, this week I was blessed with winning a website designing competition at my company, the prize - an iPad! Truth be told, from a company of nearly 2000 employees - there weren't a huge number of entries as not everyone had the technological know-how to create a website.

Even so, I'd still like to think my design, concept and it's user-friendliness got me to the top. From the knowledge I've picked up over the past year when building freelance websites for companies; I defnitely feel more confident at delivering high quality designs and interfaces that not only satisfies the client but more importantly I'm proud to make. Don't get me wrong though...I'm not arrogant in what I do, and I'm far from where I want to be as a web guru.

Anyway, we're going off topic - what I wanted to write about was this darn iPad. Many people have commented that for all the time I spend creating websites and working on software programming, I'm not the gadgety type - I just don't understand it! I'm happy to play with a gadget for an hour, but soon enough will get bored and if it's not useful I don't want it, odd it may be.

I had a play with the iPad last night; it's beautiful, sleek, clean, quick, clever....but what does it do?! So far, I've watched YouTube a lot, and played with Google Maps...just for the resizing and panning fun you can have with it. Now I'm at a loss....I recently got my holy grail Android phone which I can't leave alone as I can access the internet, email, facebook, AND phone people; the iPad just seems a bigger and more cumbersome version of this...without phoning (though to be honest, I'm not sure I'd want to make a phone call on it!)

Maybe some can enlighten me on what I'm missing, don't get me wrong - I like it, just don't know what to do with it!!

For the love of jQuery!

I've been developing websites for the past 8 years; both for big companies around the UK and US as well as smaller companies in Exeter, UK. There's nothing more exciting when creating websites than to get to grips with some really flashy UI's that will plug-and-play but also allow you to delve deep into the underlying code and modify it to your needs.

I appreciate jQuery has been around for over 4 years now, and I'm far too late to express this as a new-found technology that you must have - but it's still worth talking about as it's popularity and ease of use in my opinion is snowballing.

As a freelance website designer in Exeter, there's nothing better when brainstorming with new and existing clients than being able to show them something flashy, quickly and uncomplicated to give them that all important vision of where we can go with their website.

Generally I start with a standard jQuery plugin and as the functionality dictates I then take a look under the hood to customise it as required. Have a look at my portfolio page of websites; a number of which use customised jQuery plugins to create cool image galleries and UI's. Check out The Paper Florist's website to see how to customise the 'Simple Controls Image Gallery' to be combined with the jQuery Lightbox - simple yet surprisingly effective!

Why aren't I using this fantabulous technology already, I hear you ask!? Simple answer: I really don't know. It's lightweight, cross-browser compatible, powerful, UI rich and most of all: easy to bend to your needs.

So....next time you start messing around with images, navigation or anything clientside on a website, take a sneak at jQuery and code with a smile!

About me:

If you're interested, feel free to contact me about website design; or have a browse through my website and portfolio to see how jQuery's changed my life.