Wednesday, June 30, 2010
One Step Forward
Every website design and development project goes through stages of progress and digression. This version of Nextrev is no different. As I mentioned before, this site is made with Expression Engine. Initially, I had built my info architecture based on my notions of how EE could work and it did fine. But the the redesign changed my mind.
The site you see now is a dramatic departure from its first iteration in more than one way. First, the design is much more open and airy with more graphical details and a less dominating color scheme. Second, it uses the Structure Module to provide, well, structure.
Every CMS has its own way of organizing site content in admin mode. In EE’s case its through custom fields and “weblogs”, essentially tables of grouped information. Individual entries in these weblogs can be sorted by weblog, but other wise appear as one long list. Structure puts order into the admin side of the equation by creating a visible parent-child relationship between pages and entries. This is a huge benefit to the editing process once the “structure” has been put in place.
Now, once Structure has been implemented, its great. But be forewarned, retrofitting an existing site is confusing but in the end, quite rewarding. To retrofit an old site, all the weblogs need to be rebuilt from scratch. Structure can’‘t make use of a weblog created before its installed. A new installation will not experience this step in the process.
Along with a much simplified view of entries and pages, the templates are also simplified. Prior to Structure, I had several template groups that created the parent child relationship as viewed through the url. This meant more templates, and more weblogs, and of course more work to update the site. Now, rather than have one template group for each top-level menu item, everything is contained in one template group. In a way, Structure flattens the apparent info architecture because it creates the relationship with a custom url. You’ll have to read the site knowledge base to find out more. I can tell you its a well spent $65.
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