in which we discuss Content Management Systems

[RedTomato]

budget! oh my

I'm amazed too. My partner built up the company over the last 5 years, starting from a scratchy old desk in her living room, and now we have proper offices and staff and everything.

May not last long, the London 2012 Olympics are sucking all the money out of arts funding - first they were due to cost £2.4 billion a year ago, now it's 'actually' £10 billion, with another 5 years of hidden overspending to go.

i saw aspx in one of the links there, so i'm guessing it was made with .net?

I'd forgotten all about .net. Had a look at microsoft's .net website, yes, deffo made with the dark side

btw, i like many aspects of your current site.

Which aspects? I'd really like some feedback if you don't mind - I'm entering planning meetings in the next few months, so it will be good to know what to keep / chuck away.

regarding content management of theater stuff, specifically shows: the reason i first tried drupal (even though i was familiar w/ mambo) was because of the taxonomy -- i wanted to be able to multiply-classify shows from our history.

Taxonomy isn't a concern for me, but unified look and feel is.

At first I was a bit uncertain about Joomla / Drupal layout capabilities, but after looking at some Joomla / Drupal demo and sample sites, I think it's workable.

This Joomla demo page is reasonably similar in layout to the http://www.shapearts.org.uk/ page that I mentioned earlier.

http://demo.joomla.org/demo15/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=52&Itemid=43

The feeling I'm getting is that Joomla scores in terms of ease of use once it's all set up.

Are the Joomla forums the best place to find a good Joomla developer in London?

 

[zimv20]

Which aspects? I'd really like some feedback if you don't mind - I'm entering planning meetings in the next few months, so it will be good to know what to keep / chuck away.

please take everything i say w/ a grain of salt, because i'm not a web designer in all but the loosest sense of the word.

i like:
- the banner (incl. the unique photos on each page)
- the way the menus are laid out (but not the font)
- i like purple, so i like the colors
- the show page, in that there's a consistent look 'n' feel to each entry

not so big on:
- the bread crumb (seems kind of arbitrarily placed)
- the text boxes and text therein get a little busy, e.g. on the partnership page. further, on that page, the Monitoring and Development banners are confusing me in terms of hierarchy on that page

but overall, i think it's a nice balance of clean and informative.

Are the Joomla forums the best place to find a good Joomla developer in London?

if there's a specific forum for hiring someone for work, i've not visited it (there are a *lot* of forums there , but i do know there are a lot of brits active on the site. so i think it's worth a shot.

 

[RedTomato]

i like:
- the banner (incl. the unique photos on each page)
- the way the menus are laid out (but not the font)
- i like purple, so i like the colors
- the show page, in that there's a consistent look 'n' feel to each entry

not so big on:
- the bread crumb (seems kind of arbitrarily placed)
- the text boxes and text therein get a little busy, e.g. on the partnership page. further, on that page, the Monitoring and Development banners are confusing me in terms of hierarchy on that page

Thanks for your time I suspect the main reason you like the site is cos it's in purple

The guy in charge of the site before me had about triple the amount of pages, with double the text, with files all over the server tree - it was impossible to find the same code or photo two days in a row. I spent about a week tidying up the files, and another week or two trimming down and rewriting the pages.

I agree there isn't much need for the bread crumb now. The Partnership page's a mess I agree. It used to be about 5 pages, so I cut it all down, put them together, then I got moved to a different project. Boss agrees it doesn't convey its point, and is almost unreadable - we will dump it in the site upgrade. Basically all changes are on hold till the redesign.

Have to change all the photos for the new version too, as the guy in them has now left the company (!) I'll be going to try to provide sign language versions of all the pages. Will see how that goes.

Thanks for your time, and I'm off to bed now.