Our New Site

This new version of our site (version: God knows how many !) was the result of reading an article in Wired Magazine on why free is the future of business(Wired), it began as a brief experiment to see just how far WordPress has come since we first used it last year for building Danny Crates (800m gold medal winning paralympians) website (dannycrates.co.uk).

Could it handle a portfolio style website with powerful CMS functionality , including Ajax , various UGC plug capabilities, accessibility, usability and most importantly ease of use and speed of updates for us ?

So armed with the latest copy of WordPress, a custom theme and some of the plugins we thought we’d like to use for the site (including FLV player, tagging etc.) we set to work building this site.

Our old site was built in Coldfusion which although fast and easy for developers to use, its spread isn’t as wide as php so we’d had the idea for a while to re-build it in php. The problem was that we put a lot of work into our coldfusion CMS two years ago. Sure, we could have built upon it, but why re-invent the wheel when theres a whole plethora of CMS solutions out there and the perception of Coldfusion (well by us anyway) is that it really does seem to be a dying language.

Having used a whole gamut of CMS’s over the years from open source to commercial to custom build it was simply a matter of sorting out our priorities on what we felt was the most important factor for the new site build….And this we felt was quite simply the content – the work we produce for our clients.

We’d already developed a great concept for a re-build using Flash but we felt at this stage the development time and costs would be pretty prohibitive (we’d be looking at 2 -3 months development), when what we really wanted to do was highlight some of our larger projects in the form of indepth case studies and to re-work the existing content for some of our more important projects and cull some of our older projects.

We also wanted to make the site more ” sticky” , encouraging visitors to feedback on projects, build our blog into the core site (which might encourage us to actually use it more) and have all our videos as Flash instead of Quicktime.

Taking these factors into consideration and looking at all of the available options, WordPress more than managed to fit the bill. And at its open source price it didn’t hit us in the wallet either.

So here it is the final product. Let us know what you think, post some comments. And if you want to know the development time from idea , to research to making this site live , it was less than 5 days ! (although the content is still far from finished) !

So thats it , our experiment in Open Source is complete and its suddenly turned our business model on its head….We’ve got some more hacking of the code to get it to do a few more things but so far we’re more than happy with the results…