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General Discussion

Posted by Adam Sackfield
Adam Sackfield
Courses Plus Student 19,663 Points

Advice needed

Nearly finished a project for a client, temp hosting is here (Chrome will throw a phishing warning but that another matter i can't resolve.) The clients now want to add a CMS. What is the best way to go about this?

Any advice would be appreciated.

10 Answers

Darren Hoyne
Darren Hoyne
2,384 Points
Darren Hoyne
Darren Hoyne
2,384 Points

I know nothing about CMS at my point we never covered them in college but may I give some other points?

Adam Sackfield
Adam Sackfield
Courses Plus Student 19,663 Points

Sure, design isn't down to me the clients supplied PSDs. But i am always open to suggestions

Darren Hoyne
Darren Hoyne
2,384 Points

Its not so much design. On my browser at least(IE9), The footer is refreshing the testimonials and other logos at a very quick rate. Too quick for me to be able to read? Same is happening on the About Us page for Testimonials aswell.

Just incase you were unaware!

Adam Sackfield
Adam Sackfield
Courses Plus Student 19,663 Points

Ah yes i am aware of that, its just for the clients to preview without having to wait a life time for them to cycle through, i hate the footer but the clients are being picky. Cheers for the heads up anyway.

Darren Hoyne
Darren Hoyne
2,384 Points

No worries bud! I like the form though ! :)

Chad Passaro
Chad Passaro
1,130 Points
Chad Passaro
Chad Passaro
1,130 Points

I would turn it into a Wordpress site. Adding the CMS functionality would be easy

Adam Sackfield
Adam Sackfield
Courses Plus Student 19,663 Points

Cheers Chad i started the Wordpress course before i took on this project so have been too busy to finish it, with a minimal PHP knowledge do you think it would be that easy thou?

Aaron Walton
Aaron Walton
3,557 Points
Aaron Walton
Aaron Walton
3,557 Points

Chrome is reporting that site as a phishing site.

Adam Sackfield
Adam Sackfield
Courses Plus Student 19,663 Points

I mentioned that in the OP. From what I can gather from Google forums it's partly because when been developing for clients and uploading to the aforementioned site for them to view without adding anti robot meta tags, and this has caused them to think its a phishing site as it has been a few different companies during dev, dev tools says its fine. I had given up on this issue really.

Aaron Walton
Aaron Walton
3,557 Points
Aaron Walton
Aaron Walton
3,557 Points

Yeah sorry I should have noticed the note in the OP.

Tom Bedford
Tom Bedford
15,645 Points
Tom Bedford
Tom Bedford
15,645 Points

Perch is far easier to retrofit into a site compared to making a WordPress theme out of it. It isn't free though.

Adam Sackfield
Adam Sackfield
Courses Plus Student 19,663 Points

Will have a look into that now. Started trying to create a WP version now but it just seems like a lot of extra work for the minimal content they are going to want to add, that being just testimonials and portfolio updates.

Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson
9,152 Points
Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson
9,152 Points

I agree that perch could be an easier solution but learning Wordpress functions needed wouldnt be that much more trouble, i had to complete a small marketing website last week for someone and the HTML prototype took about a day then 2 days more to integrate into Wordpress. The site only has a contact page, front page with around 18 editable sections from the back-end and a blog.

I would advice to go with Wordpress because so many people are familiar with the system so skills you learn will help with future projects.

Adam Sackfield
Adam Sackfield
Courses Plus Student 19,663 Points

Yeah i am still doing it WP route but have a Q i only need CMS on a couple of the 4 pages so how do i mix static pages with dynamic WP ones.

Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson
9,152 Points

Im sure theres a more efficient way of doing it but once youve covered all the main pages you could create other templates and add a comment at the top with a template name, then find that template name on the templates available in the pages section. Although that sounded more confusing than what it is..

I had a quick look at your site and doesn't look like there would be that many extra pages?

With the static content just copy it across to the template and the client wont be able to access it from the Wordpress back-end.

Christopher Hall
Christopher Hall
9,052 Points
Christopher Hall
Christopher Hall
9,052 Points

It sounds like you're going with Wordpress, but what really strikes me is that your clients are asking for a CMS to be added when a project is nearly complete. That totally changes the scope of the project, it's not just a little addition. I hope you can push back as the developer, communicate how much extra work it will take to accomplish this, and get properly compensated for it.

Adam Sackfield
Adam Sackfield
Courses Plus Student 19,663 Points

Yeah It is proving to be but as this is only my 2nd project I am willing to do anything for low pay just to gain the experience and contacts. But i will bare this in mind for future projects

Adam Fichman
Adam Fichman
9,502 Points
Adam Fichman
Adam Fichman
9,502 Points

if the clients are willing to pay for it, I highly recommend Barley CMS. It is extremely easy to integrate into an existing static site, and even easier for clients to update on their own. I'd gladly help you convert it if you decided to go that route.

EDIT: It should be noted, Barley is a hosted platform. So while the price might seem hight at first glance, you don't have to pay for hosting since it's included with the CMS.

Tom Bedford
Tom Bedford
15,645 Points
Tom Bedford
Tom Bedford
15,645 Points

Slightly off-topic...

Have you submitted the Chrome phishing error report? Perhaps some other people on here can fill that in for you and hopefully get the block lifted, I've sent one in.

In the future you could put dev sites on subdomains or folders on your site. I would modify your robots.txt to hide those areas from search bots rather than with a meta tag as there is always the chance you may forget to remove the tag and then the clients site wouldn't be indexed when it is live!

I usually try and work on a subdomain of the domain for the actual project e.g. staging.example.com This lets me check everything is working correctly on the final hosting so there aren't nasty surprises when we go to launch. This is also useful for if you are making changes in the future as you can have the current site and a subdomain where you work on updates.

Adam Sackfield
Adam Sackfield
Courses Plus Student 19,663 Points

Yeah i put in a report but impossible to speak to someone at Google. I will update the robots.txt file, may buy a cheap domain for testing since with asmallorange and can have 30 sites hosted.

Andrew Baisden
PLUS
Andrew Baisden
Courses Plus Student 5,132 Points
Andrew Baisden
Andrew Baisden
Courses Plus Student 5,132 Points

Wordpress has my vote I think it’s probably the easiest CMS to learn and when it comes to SEO it is one of the best and easiest to set up! My website is created using Wordpress it’s not that difficult to convert a static design into a dynamic one. You don’t even need to be that advanced in PHP to get it working in a modular way. I taught myself Wordpress using a tutorial by Chris Coyier. I will probably check out the ones here at some point. You can never learn too much.