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!
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!
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment