| Archive for Downsizer For an ethical approach to consumption |
| Brownbear |
Need some web pages doingHaving a relaunch of my pest business, offering different and more services (including weekend courses for smallholders for which the skillsharing weekend was a partial dry run), and I need to redo the web site which only has a holding page at the moment.Would anyone be interested in barter? I can offer services in shooting things, gassing things, and electronic bugging of things, or training in these things. Once the season opens I can also trade a dead Bambi. |
||||||
| jema |
I'd be happy to knock out a site like:
http://www.rosewoodfarms.co.uk/ and preferably host it, as that make it a lot more maintainable. It would have a shopping cart, and since it would be a "Joomla" site it is easy to learn and manage yourself. I do fancy some Bambi 
|
||||||
| Brownbear |
Done. |
||||||
| jema |
Another style of site is :
http://squatorange.myff.org/ I am quite keen to get one of those live. |
||||||
| Brownbear |
I used to design web sites but now I'm at the technical level of a witch-doctor to a Professor of Medicine. | ||||||
| jema |
These days it is rare and generally outdated to craft web sites in html, it is best to use something like Joomla as it is so much easier for the end user to manage. | ||||||
| Brownbear |
Mummy! The man's scaring me.... |
||||||
| orangepippin |
Joomla might be overkill for a simple site. |
||||||
| Cathryn |
Brownbear, slip away quietly now! 
|
||||||
| jocorless |
I would concur with Jema - I use Joomla for even my really simple sites now as its so much easier to work with and its there ready when folk say they want something else - Lancaster Beekeepers is using it, as is the DDTC (which I've handed over the day to day management to someone else and I just do the techy stuff on) and I'm in the process of converting the Brigantii Site to Joomla but as real life events have overtaken me somewhat the conversion is currently on hold | ||||||
| jema |
I would disagree strongly. The main problem with people writing web sites is that they create things the user cannot manage themselves, and need to either pay when they want content added, or as generally happens see the sites fall into a stagnant non updated state. Joomla gives the user a simple menu interface that lets them add content and even modules/components themselves with very little training. It is also a solution they can migrate anywhere at will. e.g. they are not dependent on the host or the web designer. |
||||||
| Fee |
While I agree that it makes sense to use Joomla or alike for most sites, as I do, for smaller sites it can be overkill.
It depends on many factors, one of them being how much the user will want to update/change the site and to what level. There are many open source WYSIWYG html editors out there that, given the right training and support, anyone can learn in much the same way as they need to learn to use Joomla. |
||||||
| orangepippin |
For a simple site, Dreamweaver or Frontpage are easy and quick - and can be moved to any hosting platform. | ||||||
| jema |
But with Joomla the user can concentrate on content, and at any time the site templates can be tweaked to give a new design whilst keeping the content intact and looking good. Obviously there is more than one way to skin a cat, but Joomla does it for me. I have more than 20 sites one way or another using Joomla. |
||||||
| Fee |
They are doing the same thing, but with a different tool. As I said, I'm talking WYSIWYG editors (with FTP built in), they need never see a bit of code, and if built well, it's still about content. The same applies to HTML sites as it does Joomla sites regarding templates too, again, if built well. |
||||||
| Fee |
I should point out that three quarters of my sites use Joomla too, I'm def. pro-Joomla, but it can be overkill for a basic 6 page website 
|
||||||
| Jamanda |
The title of the thread is
Need some web pages doing I doubt BB would care too much what was used, as long as it worked and looked good. |
||||||
| Gervase |
Seconded! What's used is probably immaterial, provided the pages look clean, load quickly and can be updated simply.
Though, personally, I'd like to think that the basic code for my web pages had been punched on to cards from a Jacquard loom and then laboriously transcribed into plain text by a team of trained macaques before being sent to the server by a sweaty little man with a cleft stick. |
||||||
| VSS |
am i wrong, or don't you need a server to use Joomla?
we use serif webplus which is really easy to use - and with that comes the use of Serif's server if you want to go down the e-comerce route. |
||||||
| mark |
my sites are also mainly joomla.
It is an excellent content management system especialy version 1.5 However for small business where the client dodn't want to do any editing themselves i would do a straight html desgn. The fast load, less things to go wrong and slightly more easily achieved high search engine rankings mean that this is right for his situation. horses for courses mark |
||||||
| Jonnyboy |
I believe that Brownbear has slipped quietly into the night. If he has any sense. | ||||||
| jema |
Agreed
I could argue every point raised, but it gets like arguing the finer points of shotgun choke! Joomla will get the job done, is actually pretty damn fast, user manageable and can take the user as far as they want to go from a simple site to full blown ecommerce. It also has a lot of search engine optimization in the mix. You can argue about different solutions, but you can't argue the point about it doing the job. |
||||||
| orangepippin |
I think mark has summed it up well. | ||||||
| Brownbear |
Is it safe for me to come out of cover now? | ||||||
| Jamanda |
That's as maybe, but none of you have addressed BB's original post. |
||||||
| Fee |
I believe Jema did straight away
|
||||||
| Jamanda |
Oh yes  I got lost in the techie speak.
|
||||||
| mark |
Yes Jema and Brown bear sorted it ourt right away.
te rest of us are just going off at a tangent as is usual in downsizer threads. You should expect it really LOL
|
||||||
| Fee |
|
||||||
| Jonnyboy |
No. |
||||||
| vegplot |
Joomla is just one of very many online content management systems available for managing web sites. It's installed on your webserver (another topic altogether). I'm personally not keen on it as it's PHP/MySQL based. You don't need to install anything on your local machine such as Dreamweaver, for instance. You simply log into your website and start managing it. At lot of vendors, inclusing ourselves, write our own content managements systems (CMS) when we find that solutions such as Joomla don't meet with our needs. |
||||||
| orangepippin |
Same here. |
||||||
| jema |
Writing your own CMS is really reinventing the wheel 
I have a score or so Joomla sites, some very individual looking. Most of these are made that way by keeping Joomla code totally intact which makes maintenance a doddle and adding special modules/components/mambots as needed to deal with any esoteric functions needed. For example all my free forums sites have stayed vanilla joomla apart from a cosmetic change to the admin panel and once upon a time a vital bug fix after they borked things The joy of open source though is that I could correct the bug myself, and pass on the bug report and the fix to the Joomla team so that things would be fine in the next update. A CMS is a big system and needs a big team to keep it running well.
A few of my sites like downsizer.net, myfreefriends.org and my new one dns.myff.org have also seen fit to tweak the site login code, but tweaking really is the exception and not needed for normal customer web sites. Even squatorange.myff.org the next version (maybe) of the squatorange web site is still totally core Joomla despite a radically different appearance. |
||||||
| vegplot |
Not at all. You replicate the functions of a large part that is true but you are also adding to the mix. For instance our CMS is purely XML based, we do this for a variety of reasons partly becuase it's more portable and we get better performance than using abackend database.
Not necessarily. A bigger team may well get new functionailty or a bugt fix out quicker but it can also add to the complexity of management. A well designed application should only require a small team to maintain. |
||||||
| Brownbear |
Yeah, but what button do you press to turn it on? | ||||||
| vegplot |
The blue one on the left. The red one on the right turns it off. |
||||||
| orangepippin |
Not everyone agrees that Joomla is the be all and end all of content management systems. Some of us have the temerity to think we can make a better one for our own purposes ... or just use a WYSIWYG editor for simple sites. | ||||||
| Brownbear |
Now that's what I call technical advice. |
||||||
| jema |
I'd be the last one to claim any system is the solution to all needs, but it is a darn good solution and one I am very familiar with. From the customer point of view almost any solution may get the job done, from the supplier point of view I know I can do a job for Brownbear for a reasonable renumeration on my Joomla "production line" that would not be the case if I used a totally different solution for each customer just for the sake of it. For the record not all my customer sites are on Joomla I have a couple running oscommerce where the requirements were different. |
||||||
| orangepippin |
I agree with that. The biggest cost in any software project these days is the cost of development time, so it always makes sense to use the tools that you know will do the job for you and are totally familiar with all their quirks. For the same reason I always use SQLServer for holding data, even where it is overkill, because I know it works. |