new website finished (finally)

[mux]

hey folks,

pardon the spam. I've just spent the past three weeks rebuilding my site, porting all the content into a CMS (Joomla! to be exact), learning CSS and such. I'm finally caught up to this decade in web design.

Check it: http://mux.ca

Now that it's easy to add new content, expect to see updates faaaaar more frequently. Maybe even subscribe to the RSS feed.. ;)

[scue]

Nice job on css. I've never managed to implement it in an effecient manner. though I haven't done any web work in a good amount of years.

The design is missing something though. Mainly the top banner. It reminds me of a business orientated site. Maybe make the header more graphical and personal?

looks good

[dj_soo]

how hard was it to incorporate that into your existing site? Did it require a re-code of your entire site? I'm sick of updating purely via html (hence the lack of updates on my site) but I don't really want to spend a ton of cash re-developing my site to utilize a CMS.

Keep in mind i'm a total html/web-development n00b

[mux]

hmm - well, I didn't really integrate it at all, I completely replaced the old site (which was basically 10-12 HTML pages that I updated by hand), then when it was done I just deleted index.html and the new site (ie index.php) became the new site.

after I decided on what CMS I wanted to use, there was really three parts to the rebuild

- learning to use the CMS... that included letting go of a lot of preconceptions and learning how to do things the way the CMS wanted me to, instead of trying to learn how to make the CMS do what I wanted it to. Difficult, but worth it in the end, IMHO. The real problem is that every CMS is different, so whichever you choose, this time is unavoidable and wasted if you decide to change softwares.

- porting over all the content. I had a lot, and still do. It didn't take *that* long, mostly figuring out the groups and sub-groups, deciding what kind of data they each were, setting up the entries and copy-pasting data into them.

- making the layout my own - this took by FAR the most time. I started with a template set I downloaded from the net, then slowly and painfully figured out the CSS layout and modified it and massaged it for many days until it looked right. Then I switched from FireFox to IE, and what do you know, it didn't look at all the same, so I had to learn how to make CSS work between browsers.

If you're not picky, you can pretty much use a default template, switch out the header image, fill it with your content and you're done. The point of using a CMS is that the backend is extensible - like, I'm two clicks away from having a PayPal shopping cart on my site, though I don't think that's going to happen any time soon. ;)

[dj_soo]

so what you're saying is that i'm better off having a pro do it for me? :)

*completely website building inept*

ideally I would want to keep my layout the same as it is now but my CSS skills are pretty much non-existent...

[mux]

Originally Posted by dj_soo

so what you're saying is that i'm better off having a pro do it for me? :)

*completely website building inept*

ideally I would want to keep my layout the same as it is now but my CSS skills are pretty much non-existent...

poooossibly better off. the problem with pros is that you really do get what you pay for. if I'd paid for my site, it would have been at least a couple thousand. instead it cost me nothing but my time and frustration.

have you considered going with something like wordpress or drupal? less features, but way simpler to setup and maintain, and it'd be way cheaper to just get a pro to 'skin' your site for you than to build it all for you.

[mekim]

check out drupal for sure, i do a lot of work with it.

[FeelGood]

very simple but straight to the point.

nice work!