Good evening all!

 

I am in my final year of Univeristy studying BSc Web Design. To fund my excutive student lifestyle I do a little web design work on the side.

 

My latest job is to create a site for a activity centre that offers quad biking, hover crafts and a range of other activities.

The site will display these activies with images and descriptions for three locations in the country. The site will rarely be updated, probably in the region of once or twice a year.

It is really important the on site SEO is optimized for maximum results.

 

I have asked a few designers I chat to on IRC whether to use a CMS and the majority reccommended using wordpress.

I have experience with wordpress but not as a non-blog cms. My concern is that wordpress may be a little overkill for the job and also there may be a lot of work involved in sifting through all the template and php's to optimize the code for SEO.

 

I am on the edge of ditching the CMS idea and hand coding with php templates.

 

My questions are:

 

Would you use a CMS and if so which one?

 

Can I get away without a cms? (This will also have the benefit of me charging the client for updating his site!)

 

Thankyou all, I hope this isn't too much to ask on my first post!

 

Regards,

 

Dave

I'd use a CMS. If SEO is a priority, that really means that there will probably be ongoing tweaks to content. SEO isn't really 'set and forget', it's kind've a continual process.

 

Which CMS to use depends on a lot of other things, though.. how many people will be updating content, what sort of controls and permissions they'll be needing etc.

 

You could get away without a CMS, but I wouldn't have thought that would be best for the client, which is what the priority should be.

I'd use a CMS. If SEO is a priority, that really means that there will probably be ongoing tweaks to content. Which CMS to use depends on a lot of other things, though.. how many people will be updating content, what sort of controls and permissions they'll be needing etc.

 

Thanks bumbluff, one admin account will be sufficient for updating the site. The client will not be involved in any SEO tweaks that will be my job.

 

Can you point me towards any CMS you think suitable? I have looked at Drupal & Joomla and decided they are far too overkill for this job. I have read some good articles on using Wordpress as a cms.

 

Thanks,

 

Dave

I'd probably go with a CMS as well, if only to take adavantage of things like dynamic categories, ease of updating and SEO functionality. Plus it's always there if you need to add new features later on.

 

There again, it depends how many "pages" you'd have to create, if it's only a dozen or so then a static site isn't going to be much hassle to maintain. If on the other hand you have hundreds of pages/entries/photos etc then a CMS will work better for you.

Personally, I'd probbly go for Textpattern. Quick and easy to customise, much less involved than Wordpress etc, but still capable of a lot. User permissions are a bit limited, but that's not an issue if you're doing everything.

Personally, I'd probbly go for Textpattern. Quick and easy to customise, much less involved than Wordpress etc, but still capable of a lot. User permissions are a bit limited, but that's not an issue if you're doing everything.

 

Could you not make your own system, seeing as it will rarely be updated and has only one login, wouldn't be that hard.

Could you not make your own system, seeing as it will rarely be updated and has only one login, wouldn't be that hard.

 

What would the advantage of that approach be?

http://www.cushycms.com/ is my to penny's worth

I'd have to agree with BF on this one. Textpattern is more than adequate for what you're proposing, without all the un-needed bits and pieces one gets with the likes of wordpress, joomla etc

I would agree with the others, use a CMS, maybe something like Joomla or Drupal. Both are good for SEO.

Thanks all, I will be looking at TextPattern shortly.

 

Cheers,

 

Dave