It's alive! It's alive! It's alive!

[thirdworld]

Our new website is live. Yes, my boss picked April Fool's Day to launch it. It is coincidentally the start of our organization's fiscal year, and I have no idea what that says about us. Mostly the date was picked because we had to stop some time. The project had taken longer than expected and had grown considerably beyond our earlier expectations.

Comments

[thirdworld]

Yes, I am going to DrupalCon. I'm really looking forward to it...late or not ;).

On the Drupal stuff, I'm looking to add a bunch of blog entries and documentation over the next while. The idea is that our recipe is available to all to compare. I'll tweet about most and blog about some from LJ too.

[thirdworld]

Oh, and thanks for the nice comments.

[kmarkhoover]

It looks pretty good. I like the color and the layout, though I admit I'm no professional.

[thirdworld]

Thank you. You know how writers will tell readers or writers group members, "You may not be an expert writer, but you are an expert reader." Well, you use a lot of websites. You're an expert ;).

[lauriemann]

I've been dealing with, but do not program, Joomla. It's a very contrary CMS in that you have to be a real programmer to do anything that should be very basic, like designing a page or creating a menu.

[thirdworld]

I don't know enough about Joomla, but my understanding was that it handled things like that out of the box.

[lauriemann]

Our site is heavily, heavily customized. They are still buying "more boxes" (Joomla extensions) to do everything that needs to be done.

[thirdworld]

I can't speak to the specifics of your project, but as a general rule, the more you customize, the less useful a CMS is. There comes a point where you really should have used a framework instead. You can see a CMS as a Swiss Knife. It's full of all sorts of tools and can do many different things, right out of the box. However, even though it may have a large knife that can be used to peel potatoes, it is not a potato-peeler. If you try to customize the CMS to have a potato-peeler then you start to get all sorts of issues. In essence you are using it in a manner it was not designed for, and it is the kind of problem that can cascade. Most issues with CMS tend to be self-inflicted and tend to be related to over-customization. On Drupal you would not have to buy anything. There are no monetized modules. Further, Drupal is designed with modular customizations in mind, so, if you do it "the Drupal way" the above issue is greatly reduced. Even so, there is a line of customization beyond which a custom-coded solution is the better way to go

[debgeisler]

From a visual and information architecture standpoint, this is very clean, very useful, beautifully balanced, and quite attractive. A *great* piece of work. The feeling of it...the tone...is "we are competent; we are open; we care about people." Very, very nice.

[thirdworld]

Holy crap, that was an awesome comment. Thank you. That is very much what we were aiming for, and given your skillset the comment means that much more. On the site, my boss outlines the site history and our thinking and she will love reading your comment and seeing how much of what we aimed for was achieved.

My boss had a clear vision and realizing it and making the site attractive was all agrathea's work. The red in the logo was a huge challenge. The guys who built the prior site solved the problem by changing our logo colors on the website. I kid you not. Then the "wrong" logo started cropping up all over the web as organizations linked to us, and also appeared in documents they sent to us. Changing the logo was not an option we had, so we had to make it work. But all this was secondary to the points you noted.

There is a lot of information and we wanted it to be easy to find and we wanted to be welcoming. Thanks so much for your comments.

[debgeisler]

After I read the link to the history and thinking...then re-read my own comments...I sat here snickering and saying, "Well, they did exactly what they wanted to." Congratulations! That happens too rarely in the world of web design.

[agrathea]

Thanks for that lovely complement. It's so nice to hear your feedback, because that was exactly the feeling we were all aiming for in the presentation and visuals.