This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Where have all the agents gone? got me thinking about occasions in the past where I have dealt with “transparent middle men”. People who -aside from introducing the other two parties- have absolutely no input in, nor provide any value to a project.

If someone refers work on to us, and it’s a project we embark on, we will certainly be grateful, and in most instances discuss a referral commission or finder’s fee of sorts. But when that translates into a situation where this middleman is white labelling our services (also a workable solution in the right situation), but not providing any value to the tasks at hand, and possibly even stifling communication, then you have to stand back and wonder if their intervention is of any value to our business or the end client’s.

It’s not only about who you know

I fully understand and agree that in business; who you know plays a big part, but if you keep those connections too closely guarded and stop the natural flow of conversation, you’re doing a disservice to yourself in the long run; and to your client and service provider, in the long and short term… a damaging experience all round.

How we provide value

What we provide in our role as website design consultants is far more than tying a client to a designer and developer and cashing in on the profit. We administer each project from a top level standpoint and provide a single point of contact from whom every aspect of your project is managed. There are clearly planned and strategised phases to every project, and each task is discussed, documented, scheduled, carried out, tested and followed up on.

After reading Seth’s post, I feel confident that our role in providing solid, value based services to our clients both past, present and future is a good investment of our time in improving Allchorn Design, and the offerings we provide to our clients.

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.

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.

Recently, I did a (very) small WordPress driven website for a friend of mine for his up and coming laptop and notebook repair service. Things went anything but smoothly in some aspects like moving from his hosts at the time (no names mentioned) and then some controversy three quarters of the way through when someone criticised me to him sparking some doubt in his mind over my costs. This is what caused me to write about lowballers in the web design industry.

I won’t paste the entire email as there are some bits that are not related to this post (and personal stuff), but since he said:

“Feel free to post any of this on your blog, with my email address as a ref. Will be happy to advise others to use your methods.”

I decided to use this one paragraph which sums up the tone of the email and what he was saying:

“Most importantly: Your sites work – you can quote me on that. I think the value of the site far exceeds what you have charged, and I really want to thank you for going out of your way to sort me out on mates rates there. That CMS is absolutely necessary, there’s just no contesting that.”

Well, to me, that makes me feel a whole lot better in an industry where there is a lot to get frustrated about and it’s nice to know there is more to it than just the pleasure of working with technology in these exciting times on the web.

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.

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.