totalweb

Thanks all for the feedback - yeah the little rocket boy wizard was fun to make. Just to clarify a couple of points which were raised. Only a few sites in the Portfolio - Very true, this is a brand new project which was taken live on the 27th April 2012, so although we have a few more clients coming through, examples are currently limited. Unfortunately, of the first batch, everyone wanted a white website on an orange background - dumb luck! Anyway, variety is set to follow Unique design - For each site several uniquely designed banners are created, which may be used to describe your services/products/ethos/etc, or may act as adverts serving to take a visitor through to other areas of the site. Alongside these, you also receive two uniquely designed CTA's (you can order more from us if you wish, or create your own). Our design team have full control over the background to the website and will style your site to suit any existing branding, or create something from fresh for you. Pretty good flexibility to my mind. Besides this project, I also run a very large design agency with website prices starting from £3K and topping out at around £40K. From our experience websites in the UK are mostly read in an F-shape with eyes naturally being drawn to the main banners and CTA's. Beyond that, the copy needs to be presented in a clear legible manner, and within familiar locations. Yes we have a navigation at the top and secondary content to the left and right in a standard 3-column grid. I make no apologies for building readily navigable websites with great design work in an uncluttered layout So, are these 30K websites? No. But given their price point, they are an excellent means for small and start-up businesses to gain access to high quality design work, which whilst perhaps not setting the world alight, certainly won't harm your business. Re customer needs, besides the news and testimonials sections, we provide the abililty to create 2 further articles based sections - flexible enough for the majority of businesses we expect totalwebsite to come into contact with.

Hi there, I've been using project honeypot to good effect, virtually no spam getting through anymore. It's a nice collaborative effort, easy to implement and well worth a look if you haven't heard of it already. http://www.projecthoneypot.org/

I agree with Mike in terms of the learning curve with these systems. It is possible to learn just enough to get a site out the door, in a smaller timeframe. But if this job isn't critical, let it pass and do your homework first. I use both a proprietary system and the open source system Drupal, through one of my agencies. I've found Drupal to be very flexible, exceptionally well documented - the API is really easy to work with. Out of the tin, Drupal does a whole lot of nothing, so there it is possibly one of the more frustrating systems - although I work with Drupal 6 and I believe great strides have been made with the base install (images required modules)! That said, at the time, the key was to keep the footprint low and allow companies to bolt-on just those features required. Drupal has picked up this tag of being slow, but I'm not sure that's entirely fair - is it as quick as our in-house system? No, by a factor of ten or more and the memory usage is off the charts in comparison. But I'm not sure WP is any better, it all comes down to caching with these big open source systems. Drupal or WP, either would be a sensible investment in time, given the propensity of these systems.

Please take a look over my new website, let me know what you think http://www.totalwebsite.co.uk Cheers

Morning

Morning

Just a quick hi to everyone by way of introduction. I am the technical director of two design agencies based in Tunbridge Wells, the first (ifour) is a long established company offering full web and print services, with sites running from 4K upto 50k handling clients as diverse as family run shed builders to Microsoft and Cable & Wireless. The second is a new enterprise (totalwebsite), looking to help out small and startup businesses, with an easy-to-use CMS at a reduced rate. I'm enjoying greatly the opportunity to deliver a new product from scratch, to be unrestricted in your thinking with a blank canvas is one of the greatest perks to our industry. So I'm here really to see if I'm missing any tricks and offer advice where I can. I'm particularly interested in how others have approached the question of delivering an "affordable" CMS. Wayne