Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Welcome to the Nextrev Blog
I tell my customers they have to focus on content. Get engaged with your site’s content and viewers will notice as will the search engines. So, I’ll practice what I preach from this day forth.
Our site is a low traffic site. This iteration is now in a CMS which certainly facilitates the addition of content, especially the casual content found in blog entries. I make part of my living by migrating sites into content management systems of all sorts, but have yet to bother with my own. Until now.
You might be wondering which cms I’m using. I’m using Expression Engine. I’ve used others—Wordpress, Joomla, Modx, Concrete5 and I’ve rolled my own. To date the EE experience is pretty good. Like every system, there is a steep learning curve at first that can be very frustrating at times. Tags, templates, articles sections, weblogs, template variable, chunks, blocks, the list of new terms and how they are integrated seem endless. But EE has a pretty nice way about it. The documented features just work out of the box. And they should since this is not an opensource program. I’ll go into more details about this in future posts, but for now I’m quite pleased with EE.
Why EE when others are free? Well, that’s a good question. For myself, I always though there must be a CMS that has all the features I want and that my clients need and can be trained to use in a reasonable amount to time. For example, for what ever reason, I’ve never been able to wrap my head around the Joomla template system and the method of identifying the distinction between articles, sections and so forth. Believe me I’ve tried. So, I gave up and continued looking around.
I’ve tried Concrete5, but the lack of plugins and the small community made it difficult to imagine it for client work. I like it a lot, but it was just missing something. I’ve used Modx several times and its one of my favorites. Its especially easy to get clients accustomed to because of the document tree and the near perfect Wayfinder menu system. And the template system is super easy to build a site exactly the way you want. But here I am with EE.
Still have a ways to go, and of course there is the new design to implement. More on that later.
Marc
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