We’ve officially moved out to Waterfall and no longer occupy office space with the SA Web Design crew, but I’m sure we’ll continue to work together on a number of projects we’ve collaborated on over the course of 2008/9. Waterfall is a beautiful place and as you can see in the pic above, my new workspace is really inspiring (for me anyway).

This post is really something to explain whats on the cards for 2010 in a work sense, both for myself and for anyone interested in working with us.

Greater focus on security

This year has taught us some important lessons in web security not only in a local sense. The fact that Twitter got hacked twice in 2010 tells me that its becoming more and more necessary to employ more stringent security measures across the board.

Considering that we work quite heavily with third party content management systems, there will be a far greater emphasis on locking down any vulnerabilities and employing a more structured update regime.

Seeking relationships

The past 5yrs of business has seen a large number of projects pass through our production line (over 150 projects) and it has become clear that the vast majority of success stories are the clients that we have an on-going relationship with. In this vein, we’ll be looking into bundle service offerings which will run over a number of months. Some services to expect early in 2010:

• Web consulting (analysis of  your needs, technical requirements, project scoping etc.)
• Website analysis & strategy
• Design & Redesign of websites
• Content creation and management
• Online advertising and search engine optimisation
• Social media strategy, implementation and monitoring
• Email broadcasting
• Customer data collection campaigns (see our latest viral campaign offering here)
• Analytics and reporting
• Online training

Each one of those topics has a number of sub-categories but listing them all here would be tedious and a waste of yours and my time. Needless to say, the best thing to do is just pick up the phone and call us or drop us an email and find out if we can help you with your online presence.

Allchorn Rebranding

One of the great things about working predominantly in the online medium, is that its not too much trouble to visually re-invent our brand every couple of years. 2010 will see a new look for Allchorn Design. One which we’re quite excited about and one that is still technically on the drawing board. Above is an early preview mockup of how it might look.

All in all, as usual, a new year approaching is exciting, and I’d like to wish everyone a fantastic Christmas and awesome new year!

Dionysus approached us with a brief to realign the website to better leverage the online medium. The site features a full CMS implementation, user registration, search, a blog, events calendar, discussion forum and a photo gallery.

This project for Dionysus went from initial consultation through information architecture, interface design, HTML/CSS coding, CMS implementation (Joomla!), content insertion and training.

The client was an absolute pleasure to work with, and we wish Irene, Seth, Kathy, Angie, QJ,  Jeannette and everyone else all the best with their new website.

The Collective Branding and Design are one of our longer standing clients. Starting out when the principal designer -Leigh Dyson- was still operating as a sole proprietor under the name of Dyson Design, we have grown alongside The Collective and together have done a number of collaborative works over the years.

When Leigh contacted me last week, she expressed interest in getting a blog online for The Collective and within a short timeframe (less than a week) we managed to create a unique blog interface for the site. Working off our original WordPress installation and the initially solid code foundation, we upgraded their installation to the latest version and integrated the blog neatly with minimal plugins.

Personally I think it came out quite nicely.

Keen to know your opinion if you have one – introducing The Collective Branding and Design Blog.

I still want to add some nice navigation elements, lists, image styling etc. Possibly integrate lightboxing and look into some other semantic, non intrusive javascript that is realistic to use in as wide a variety of systems as possible. I’ll probably look more into jquery, but I do want to keep things as simple as as scalable as possible.

The more it goes in one direction, the more difficult it is to backtrack. I guess this will be an evolutionary process.

Essentially it’s working on a 12 column grid and can easily accommodate a neat one, two, three or four column layout. Work in thirds, quarters, halve it, or use the full width (960px) of the design. It’s a fixed width, centered design and I will likely make it into a WordPress theme in due course.

I started building this as an illustration for the course I’ll be teaching in web design for Hirt & Carter next year, and it’s grown so far beyond that. It’s good fun, and tests my skills and knowledge. Coding is going to be fun, but it’s so rigidly grid based, I suspect it’s going to be quite easy. Little do I know hey?

I had a recent resurgence of interest in the idea and spent a bit of time redesigning the interface. I think it came out pretty nice, but subsequent to doing all that, I decided I’m going to publish the concept on a different domain and under a different name.

I just figured I’d share the design, and if anyone wants it to perhaps make a theme out of it, I can send them the layered PSD.

As it seems WordPress is the talk of the web publishing world right now, I’m busy with a lot of WordPress related projects. I had to looks for some specific extensions for the system called Plugins. and in so doing, I came across some nifty addons that I’d like to share. Some I will use on client sites, some on my own, and others I’ll just keep a note of for future reference.

Google Sitemap Generator

This one was actually found in a search for a meta tag management plugin for WordPress, and although I discovered that there are other ways to solve the meta tag debarcle (another time), this one was a good find, and already on this site.

Sociable

This plugin gives you a huge selection of social websites that your visitors can use to share the content of your site/blog. I’ll integrate it into this site, but need to do some offline testing before it doesn’t post links below my intro blurb on the front page (my entire site is WordPress driven).

WordPress.com Stats

Now, don’t get me wrong, I use Google Analytics every day, as I believe it to be the most effective and easiest to use analytics software available. However, the WordPress.com (hosted WordPress) stats plugin gives you instant statistics in your dashboard which is handy and doesn’t require you to log into GA for a quick glance at your traffic.

CForms II

To me there is no debate over this being one of the most useful plugins for WordPress. Create, manage and edit your forms for your website. Publish them on pages, posts, whatever. Submit to email or a database. Built in AJAX form validation… etc.

Subscribe 2

Allow your visitors to subscribe to notifications of new posts and content. Even taking your content and sending an hourly, daily or weekly digest of your new additions. This one is really handy to keep those unfamiliar with RSS up to date via email.

Well, those are them. Some are almost essential (CForms & Google Sitemap Generator), while others are nice to haves that definitely won’t hurt.

WordPress by default makes use of the TinyMCE rich text editor and as such, it’s quite extendable. It’s very well documented in their documentation wiki and does a lot more than what WordPress enables out of the box.

This is what I was looking to do

WordPress’ WYSIWYG displaying table editing tools on the bottom row.

Shock horror! I hear some standardistas ranting about tables being evil already. Well, I hate to burst some bubbles, but tables were invented for a reason. Believe it or not, for tabular data!

WordPress, the popular content management system was initially built for blogs, and I am guessing the omission of the ability to create and edit tables in the interface was a well thought out decision and I hold nothing against them for doing so. My clients however, they disagree. Well some of them at least.

Now that WordPress is powering not only blogs, but online magazines, corporate websites and all different types of sites, it’s quick becoming a very powerful and popular generic CMS. Extending it has become a big game.

My client had a pricing page and needed the ability to add tables, modify cells, padding, spacing, background colours etc.

Cobus over at Fresh01 found this page on the WordPress codex site which you’ll noticed I’ve commented on. I just felt the need to write this post with a bit more detail.

The process

Firstly I downloaded TinyMCE, and put the “table” folder into the plugins directory in wp-includes/js/tinymce/plugins.

Then in the file tiny_mce_config.php I edited this line:

$plugins = array( 'safari', 'inlinepopups', 'autosave', 'spellchecker', 'paste', 'wordpress', 'media', 'fullscreen' );

and added

,'table'

into the array.

I then scrolled down and edited

$mce_buttons_3 = apply_filters('mce_buttons_3', array( ));

by adding

'tablecontrols'

making it

$mce_buttons_3 = apply_filters('mce_buttons_3', array('tablecontrols' ));

Then opened up a post/page edit and refreshed the page…. Viola! Table editing tools.

Problem, I can’t edit the cell colours…

Well, after editing the config file and being familiar with the way it’s laid out, all I needed to do was look at the available buttons and controls for TinyMCE and find the button for background colour, and that happend to be backcolor.

Therefore, after ‘tablecontrols’ in the line

$mce_buttons_3 = apply_filters('mce_buttons_3', array('tablecontrols' ));

I added

, 'backcolor'

So it looked like

$mce_buttons_3 = apply_filters('mce_buttons_3', array('tablecontrols', 'backcolor' ));

And thats that.

If you want to add other buttons and controls, browse through that wiki page, and if they don’t activate, you’ll just need to upload the relative plugin folder from your downloaded TinyMCE package.

I found CamStudio which very effectively recorded all my on-screen movements, and in Movie Maker (I’m a web designer, not a video guru), I stitched it to some video from my Sony Handycam. Threw in some nice music and put some titles and credits in.

Here’s the result.

This may come across as a rather opinionated post, but it’s my view, and my blog. Any thoughts (logical, non trolling comments) would be most appreciated.

I’ve broken the different types of systems into

• Home Grown CMS
  A system built in-house rather than buying one or customising another system.
• Open Source CMS
  A system built by a community of developers under a sharing community based methodology. Usually free. Examples – Joomla, WordPress, Typo3.
• Proprietary CMS
  Built by one company, maintained, supported and available as either a one off cost, or licencing payment structure. Examples – Realm Platform, Expression Engine, Vignette.

Home Grown CMS

Up until late 2007, I was heavily involved in the design and development of a content management system called SimpleCMS. It’s since been discontinued, thought it continues to effectively power a few websites. Successfully adopted as it was, suffice to say, the development team lost steam and we opted to count our losses and move on.

The concept behind developing a home grown CMS system is a very noble -if not misguided- cause on the most part. I tend not to talk in absolutes, but if you don’t have a rather large budget (£50,000+) or an exceptionally self motivated and enthusiastic development team it’s a classic example of a reinvention of the wheel.

If you have the infrastructure, and an exceptionally strong need for something custom that is not done by one of the many established systems, then this could be an option. Word of warning here… do your homework on what’s available!

Home grown CMS systems are sustainable when you have a long term team of developers with a proven track record of successful developments.

Pros

• Write your own system and have it do exactly what you want.
• If it’s a niche system, and licenced accordingly, it could be resold later to others.

Cons

• Prohibitively expensive.
• Can take a good deal of time to develop.
• Often you can get the functionality you need from free or relatively inexpensive alternatives.

Open Source CMS

A system that is free to download, install and work with. What could be better? On the surface, this seems like a no-brainer, but when you dig a bit deeper, there are some serious cons that creep into the mix.

The popular systems out there, amongst others, include Joomla, Drupal and Typo3. Some systems initially intended to power blog style sites are also evolving into quite competent content managers. WordPress and Textpattern being the two that I know the most about.

If you’re looking at cost, you’re mistaken in thinking that getting a professional result from an open source system on a smaller budget is likely. More often than not, the professional Joomla or WordPress designer and manipulator comes at a professional, market related price. The fact that the system is free means little when you want a specific design, layout and modes of publishing, moderating and syndicating.

The world of open source CMS’s does cover an extremely broad field of requirements and a large percentage of websites should be fine on one of them. More than a little research should be carried out before deciding on a system and any future possible requirements.

Open source CMS systems are sustainable when you are aware of the fact that although you’re getting it for free, you still have to put a lot of work in. Slapping up a default theme and expecting things to do themselves is counter productive, and you won’t get far.

Pros

• Most systems are supported by a large community and you will find assistance all over the globe.
• Modifications to the site, including the CMS itself is permitted by the GPL licence, so it can effectively be “white labeled”.
• A large selection of systems and features.
• The decent systems are constantly being updated, and security flaws patched up.
• The software itself is free.

Cons

• Due to the large community, there are a lot of semi-skilled and outright charlatans out there proclaiming to be gurus.
• When things go wrong, the solution could prove costly and take time, unless you have a true specialist on call and available.
• Due to their popularity, they can be targets for spam and hacking.
• Training and support is often hard to find, but not impossible.

Proprietary CMS

Getting a system that has been built up commercially by a company dedicated solely to developing their system can be a very good thing. The sustainability of a proprietary system with the possibility that you paid for it, and it is maintained by those who developed and support it can’t be under emphasized.

You’ll have an initial cost, and that price can vary. Don’t  be confused with someone charging to install and customise an open source system to a company that is selling their own product. Chances are the open source guy does not know a lot about the underlying code in the CMS and when things go wrong, fixing can be a problem.

Selecting a proprietary CMS is also a matter of truly establishing your requirements and finding one that is suitable. There are some truly amazing systems out there like Realm Platform and Expression Engine.

Proprietary CMS systems are sustainable when you work with a reputable company and understand what they do (and don’t offer) before setting up your site.

Pros

• You’re dealing with the people that made the system. Likely from the ground up.
• Features are often plentiful and can accommodate most site’s requirements.
• Custom features are often an option (at a cost of course).
• Training and support are offered.
• Constant development ensures security and bug fixes are attended to promptly.

Cons

• Initial cost can be perceived as high.
• You are putting a lot of trust in one company, so choose wisely.

Summary

Really, as usual, it highly depends on how you approach your project, who you are, what you need, how quickly and how much you have in your budget.

I am heavily swayed towards the Open Source or Proprietary options unless you have extraordinarily unique requirements, a ginormous budget and a good deal of time.

Leaving the two options of open source and proprietary, I’d have to say that given the right people, either option could be suitable to you. For some clients, I know they can make do on a WordPress site, while for others, I wouldn’t dream of using anything other than a system that is fully supported by an established company.

In conclusion, I’d say I will normally opt towards the proprietary system as the optimal solution, but should the budget or requirements be lower, the need for support and training be less, I’d look at something like Joomla or WordPress.