HOW WE WORK — CONSTRUCTION
We believe in keeping things simple. Just as we work to keep the design of your website uncluttered and easy to navigate, we construct our websites knowing that you will be taking over the bulk of the updating and maintenance when we’re done. We design and build our sites so that they’re easy to update, they can easily handle new capabilities, and any good programmer can easily work on them. A focus on user-friendliness, creative interface design, and efficient coding make this possible.
Content management systems, and why we don't use them
“We want a content management system” is something we often hear our clients say. When we ask them why, they say they want the website to be easy to update and expand. So the most popular content management systems (CMSs) must be able to meet this need, right? The fact is, several of our clients came to us after having a website built for them using a popular CMS like Drupal or Joomla. They hired us to rebuild their websites because they were having a hard time updating or upgrading their sites easily using the CMS. The problem is that these systems try to anticipate and meet the needs of every possible type of website, so it is often a cumbersome task to use them for exactly what fits your organization the best. It is also a time-consuming, expensive proposition to try to make these CMSs conform to our design principles.
What we do use
So, we don’t use Drupal or Joomla, but we have created our own system for our clients to manage their website content. I guess we could call it “DG CMS.” Most of our clients use a user-friendly editing tool like Adobe Contribute (or Dreamweaver) to edit static content, coupled with our custom database-driven admin system for those things Contribute can’t handle well, like menu management, photo galleries, self-archiving newsletters, blogs, ordering systems, etc. We often get emails from clients marvelling at how easy it is to manage their websites using our system.
For those clients who have many people managing their website, or whose sites fit a certain profile, we offer two other alternatives:
- Wordpress is extremely well suited for blogging, and has gained a fair amount of content management options for other types of websites as well. If your website is primarily blog-oriented, or if you are already familiar with Wordpress and like how it works, we will develop a Wordpress site for you. Just be aware that creating a custom template for Wordpress is a time-consuming matter, and there are certain limitations to what can be done design-wise.
- MODx is a modern CMS, and in our opinion is the future of content management systems. There is nothing that can't be done with MODx, and in far less time than with other CMSs. Unlike Drupal and Joomla, there are no design limitations whatsover, and it allows for much more rapid (and cost-effective) development. It has industrial-strength security, scales well for very large sites, and it makes it easy for us to plug in whatever database-driven functionality you need. Let us know if you are interested in this option and we'll give you more details on how it works, and why it's a better option for today's websites than other CMSs you are probably more familiar with.
