Not too long ago I had a chat with a graphic designer who told me about that amazingly easy to use CMS that will leave all developers sooner or later unemployed but I did not feel that threatend to try it out until recently that I needed to come up with a solution for a models agency website that required only a few pages to be frequently updated, consisting mainly of text and images. I thought to try that miraculous thing, whose name reminded me of Sushi, that allows non developers to offer CMS solutions to their clients just out of curiosity and because I found it totally uneccessary to install a big full-on CMS or write a bespoke one.  By nature I am not easily convinced that things are as great as they sound, and in every case I try to discover imperfections and disadvantages so I make my life a bit harder than it deserves to be. However, in the case of CushyCMS, I was taken by great suprise and started being worried about graphic designers taking over the whole world being able to offer complete web sites with both great looking front-ends and functional back-end solutions.

The big advantage of Cushy is that it is very fast to set up as it only requires registration (which is free), rather than any sort of installation. It is ideal for small web sites that users want to update text and images in some parts of their site e.g. news, events or even the homepage. The only thing the designer has to do is to provide the FTP details of the site, specify which parts and pages will be editable and who is going to edit those. Cushy will then create the WYSIWYG editors and the CMS is up and running! I have never come across any CMS that can do the job so quickly, absolutely stunning!

Unless your client has a big site with lots of different content types, it is not really worth installing one of the big CMSs such as Joomla or Drupal. But even if this is the case, you would be better off developing a proprietary CMS that does exactly what your client’s requirements are, rather than install an all-in-one solution that will result in unnecessary server processing, slow response times, let aside bugs that are very hard to find and fix given that those applications have been written by so many different people using totally different coding styles.

Wordpress is getting more and more popular as a CMS lately apart from being an excellent blog platform. It is much more light-weight and clean compared to Joomla and Drupal and with the recent release of the Pods framework it can easily(?) turn into a powerful CMS. What is great about Pods is that you can create and display your own content types, and even build relationships between them, unlike Cushy, which make it really powerful while at the same time it retains all the Wordpress advantages: simplicity, SEO benefits, excellent plugins that increase functionality without having to tweak the actual code (normally). No wonder Wordpress won for the first time the ‘Best Overall  Open source CMS’ award in the 2009 Open Source CMS awards.

You need to bear in mind though, that Pods is made for developers who are familiar with PHP.  For non developers, there are a few alternatives s that can help significantly turning Wordpress into a CMS but with some limitations. The most interesting ones are:

• Custom fields built in functionality – assign custom fields to a post (requires editing templates / php files).
• More fields plugin – add extra (custom) fields in the write/edit page – more powerful than custom fields.
• WP-CMS Post control plugin – control your admin write options and hide unwanted items from content authors.

There’s many other interesting light-weight open source CMSs for small websites many developers claim they are easy to use and set up such as XOOPS, concrete5, SkyBlueCanvas, Perch and MODx. Unfortunately, I haven’t had the chance to try them yet but once I do I will write another post about them.

Over the past eighteen months, we’ve built more and more of our projects in ruby frameworks (rails, merb, and sinatra). It’s been hugely exciting for our coding team – new technology, new tricks to learn, and the whole ‘geek-cachet’ of being on the bleeding-edge.

And, whilst a change in the technologies underpinning  our sites normally elicits a disinterested ‘meh’ from those of us with ’softer skills’, our UI, design and SEO staff are hugely excited about the move as well.

So, what makes a non-programmer excited about a programming language and its associated frameworks. It’s not that it’s a ‘miracle tool’ for non-programmers – Rob still spends half his working day rolling his eyes as I ask (for the 25th time) how to add a ‘foreach’ loop in Ruby. What’s revolutionary is the way it enables us all to work closely together on a project and deliver a much more holistic and integrated solution to the client. (It’s also no bad thing that it has also slashed the time it takes for us to develop complex web applications).

To be fair it’s not all down to Ruby alone, but also the simultaneous adoption of an MVC (Model, View, Controller) workflow and ‘git’. MVC isn’t unique to Ruby frameworks, but it is much easier to incorporate than it would be with a PHP-based workflow (yes we know about Cake). Git is a robust versioning control system that leaves SVN for dead. In adopting MVC and ‘git’ we have effectively separated the work Simon (Major Model), Rob (Captain Control) and myself (Vice-admiral  View) do on a project.

Pre-Ruby, we used to design a site’s look and feel and then code it (mostly to stop designers and programmers cursing each other as the latest version of a template got overwritten for the fifteenth time). Now that we’re all able to work on a site at the same time without tripping over each-other’s ‘virtual toes’, we’re actually finding more time to talk to one another, brainstorm on the job, and refine the shape a project as we go along.

The end-results is that we are much more agile in how we build sites and applications. It’s effectively one giant ‘mix-in’ with ideas bouncing round at a million miles an hour and new features being discussed, prototyped and rolled out in hours. And the client benefit is huge (at least for those clients that ‘get’ the whole agile methodology). They’re benefitting from a cross-disciplinary team working together and building in great features that weren’t even the scope (and for for no additional charge at that). How could it be any better?

Talk to us to see what ‘agile’ can do for you.

We’ve been offering Search Engine Optimization to our clients for more than 12 months now, with some pretty good results (e.g. ‘holiday accommodation in Sitges’ for Outlet4Spain). So Simon and I thought it was about time we applied some of our new-found SEO mojo to our own site. And that’s where the trouble started, because there’s no easy way to optimize for ‘joined up thinking’. Let me explain…

When a client comes to us for help with SEO, we ask about their business. Once we know what they do, it’s usually pretty easy for us to build a list of key words and phrases to target. But, when we started keyword analysis for our own business it became pretty obvious things weren’t so clear cut.

In the olden days (somewhere about 1995) it would have been easy – we would have been optimized our site for the search term ‘web designers’. But the explosive growth of the sector and the desire for companies to carve out their own niche within it  has muddied the waters immensely.

Whilst we still call ourselves ‘web designers’, optimizing for the term increasingly seems to be bringing in the sub-£2000 first-time site brigade. It also misses the core of what we do – working with a company to shape, build, maintain and develop their web presence over the long term. We’re web strategists, we’re user-experience experts, we’re SEO specialists, email marketeers and UNIX hosting gurus. Optimizing for any one of these dilutes the  big picture – and devalues the ‘one stop shop’ approach we believe is so vitally important to making the most out of the web.

So, if anyone knows how to optimize for ‘joined up thinking in web development’ we’d love to hear from you. Until then we’ll just have to press on with the keyword-rich blog entries

I guess it’s true for a lot of businesses, but it’s a sad fact that the busier we are (and the more we have to tell you about) – the less time we get to add blog entries.

We’ve just finished up a couple of big new sites, My Wish Wand and Complete Models and effects in Merb.

Geeks like Merb because it’s an “agile, platform agnostic MVC framework that plays nicely with Ruby” (as Simon and Rob will explain in altogether too much detail if I ever let them out of the back room). But developing sites in Merb also results in huge benefits for our clients.Using Merb drives costs down and slashes development timescales.   So how does it do this? (And why should you care?).

A lot of it comes from the MVC approach used by Merb. MVC stands for Model (the end-user data we’re interested in using on the sites), View (how the data should be displayed) and Control (the actions we perform on both). This means that Simon (Mr. Model), myself (Mr. View) and Robert (Mr. Controller), can all work simultaneously on a section of a site without constantly getting in each other’s way or (thanks to our recent adoption of Git) overwriting each other’s files.

Merb is also much leaner and more flexible than Ruby on Rails (our previous MVC framework of choice). Merb 1.0 has only been out a couple of weeks, so it hasn’t hit the mainstream web design community yet. This gives us (and our clients) a real competitive edge.

It really is Merbaceous!

As you may know from previous posts, we’re loving jQuery. However, the other day I previewed a site over Vodaphone’s 3.5G mobile broadband and it all went horribly wrong. Vodafone seem to be compressing data in such a way that jQuery simply doesn’t load. The site appears just fine over T-Mobile’s network, so clearly not all carriers are doing the same thing.The solution? Thankfully it didn’t take to long to find (unlike our ongoing battle with IE7 over PNG transparency). Use the compressed version of jQuery and all is suddenly right with the world.

Everyone knows that the cool kids aren’t reading Pitchfork anymore. Why? Because they have a really lame flash menu that makes it impossible to navigate the site if you don’t have a flash plugin installed. This sort of thing isn’t unheard of, and while generally frowned upon, I don’t mind a flash menu if it does something interesting or unique, or is used on a site that pretty much offers flash content exclusively – though not even newgrounds.com uses a flash menu!

The problem is it’s a requirement you simply shouldn’t place on your users, especially if you’re offering something simple, like album reviews. Not everyone can or wants to install flash. What if you’re stuck using links? Okay, its not that big of a deal with you’re using a text-based browser (you should probably be working anyway!) but what about an iPhone? A big empty box is surprisingly unhelpful in navigating a site in mobile Safari.

We know flash is not the best thing to use as a navigation menu, but what I really don’t get about Pitchfork’s menu is that it has to be the most pointless use of flash ever. You roll over the text which turns black and the little arrow spins goes grey. That’s it. It doesn’t give you a hug or make you toast, it just has small effect that pretty close to the basic CSS :hover effect. Blink and you won’t be able to tell the difference.

Their hover effect is nice and subtle, but I don’t believe its worth the tradeoff. So I decided to try to duplicate their animation with jQuery, and while not perfect – it does mimic the effect: check it out

There’s a few problems with this.. My animated gif arrows are pretty lame, and if you mouse over the links too quickly it doesn’t finish changing to color back to grey. Also, an issue in IE causes the jQuery to print raw HTML everywhere when automatically adding the <span> tags. These issues could probably be resolved and overall, it’s probably not the most elegant solution.. But that’s not really the point. There are lots of ways we can create a nice little effect on a navigation menu in an unobtrusive way that doesn’t leave some users behind. It’s always better to put usability and accessibly above visual effects – especially when they’re not particularly exciting!

Over the last few years, air travellers have got used to ‘demand-led’ pricing. If your dates and flexible, and you book far enough in advance, you can get some insanely cheap flights. Putting to one side the fact that entire countries are being evacuated because of global warming and sea-level rise, it’s a win-win situation for both travellers and the airlines.

The great success of this model has led to companies in other sectors trying the same techniques – with mixed success. The train operating companies seem to love it, but customers – sensing the death of the ‘turn-up-and-go’ railway - are less enamoured.

One area that hasn’t yet seen this model widely implemented is the training industry. But, as with airlines, the model is a win-win scenario for training companies and their customers. In fact, we’ve just implemented the system for anew training company web site (launching very soon now).

The pricing matrix provides generous discounts, depending on how far in advance a course is booked, and how many places have been sold.The system gives real benefits to both the training company and their clients. The training company benefits because more advance bookings allow them to confirm events earlier (since they know they have at least enough participants to break-even). Clients benefit because if they commit to training far enough in advance the can save 75% on standard course prices.

Easy!