More web design

I've been spending quite a lot of time on my organization's web presence, it's definitely been interesting. We have 4+ different sites, using 4 different custom-designed technologies. I've got one that was built in Dreamweaver, one in .ASP, one in PHP, and a couple of static sites I haven't had enough time to investigate yet. Not one is a true CMS, and all have plenty of "issues", mainly on the back-end.

So the plan is to standardize and consolidate. After a lot of investigation, I narrowed the possibilities down to Drupal, Joomla, and Typo3. Of these, Typo3 is possibly the most powerful, but my previous experience with it showed me that the user community just wasn't as willing to help as with other systems. Plus, the back-end interface is a bit more complex than I would like it to be for my target content-producing audience. So it was down to Drupal and Joomla. I finally chose Drupal as our CMS technology because of the power and helpfulness of the user community, its powerful customizability, and the wealth of existing modules.

Since I didn't want to start a 6-12 month "web redesign" by committee process (my organization is heavily into the democratic process), I chose to commission someone to build a theme to mirror our existing theme. This way there wouldn't be quite as much time spent on details already decided long ago, and most future effort would go to content.

It took about a month to make the decision to use Drupal, including test installations and web research. It took only three more weeks to build a proof-of-concept site mirroring our existing organization's website design.

Not bad, I think! Drupal rocks! Oh, and so does browsershots.org!

Wireframing a website with text.

Over the last few weeks I've learned just how much I didn't know about web design and management, but I was also pleasantly surprised by just how much I do know. One of the things I learned is that it's easy to picture a site design in your head, but a little harder to actually explain it to someone without a wireframe. Enter Balsamiq Mockups, a tool that lets you have that "I designed it on a paper napkin" look even though you'd never touch a pencil to save your life because you're a total computer geek...

I also absolutely hate having to make up filler text for my test sites during the design. I remembered seeing the Lorem Impsum random text whenever someone wants to show off a site design or even a font, so a quick Google search turned up the Lorem Ipsum generator. Way faster than making up something funny for a wireframe.