WordPress as a CMS: 5 8 Power Tips for Template Developers

Published by Jake Goldman on June 7th, 2009 in Featured and Programming and WordPress Tips. 1 Comment

WordPressEver since WordPress 2.5 was released, we’ve been pushing the boundaries of WordPress as a comprehensive CMS.

WordPress offers a wealth of plug-ins that extend the limitations of its reasonably light core; we’ve even contribued a couple of our own back to the community. But if you like to make slim, fast websites – like we do – you know that sometimes the plug-ins, and their overhead, are overkill.

Here are five power tips for template developers that address common CMS implementation challenges with solutions that are not well documented or not entirely intuitive. Please note that all of the code here was written for and tested with the latest version of WordPress (2.7.1). Some of the functions may not be compatible with older versions, or may require some initialization (i.e. global $post).

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Open source and open platforms: the questions you should be asking

Published by Jake Goldman on May 24th, 2009 in Content Management Systems and Featured and Strategy. 0 Comments

UPDATE: If you found this post worthwhile, check out Matt Asay’s latest post at CNET, “What open source could learn from proprietary platforms”, which includes a reference to our post.

Increasingly, savvy organizations are asking for web solutions built on open source content management systems. We’re all for it: we’ve built solutions on a variety of platforms, including WordPress and Drupal, both open source projects. We’ve even released a few open source plug-ins of our own.

Open source certainly offers benefits, including a transparency that we believe encourages better programming (“the best disinfectant is light”), the removal of the dependence on a single software vendor, and often times, incredibly low cost of ownership. All of that said, as advocates of custom solutions for clients with custom needs, we know that the open source solution isn’t always the right solution.

More importantly, we’ve found that savvy clients and prospects asking for open source are actually getting at something more essential: open platform solutions.

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Assorted client news: RFP Builder, Acelero, YAMI in NYT, and more

Published by Jake Goldman on May 16th, 2009 in Clients and Content Management Systems. 0 Comments

The Council of Public Relations Firms launched the first version of RFP Builder; a web application that guides prospective PR firm clients through the process of selecting the right firm. Our new case study has the details.

Acelero Learning released the new version of their public website. Built on CitySoft Community Enterprise, the site includes a new Head Start Resource Center with self registration, a custom news channel with improved formatting, and a custom jQuery-powered slideshow on the home page that offers all the elegance of Flash without the overhead or maintenance costs.

YAMI-U and the resulting campaign, No LOL in HIV, was featured in an article in the New York Times. We led the web component of this campaign, working closely with the youth advocates and the creative directors, The Watsons.

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Home page face lift for NELLCO

Published by Jake Goldman on April 10th, 2009 in Clients and Design & Creative and Featured and Strategy. 4 Comments

Most of our website design projects involve a first design for a new site or web application, or a complete redesign from the ground up. A home page and design “refresh”, however, can be a smart, often overlooked investment in a site’s vibrancy, particularly in times when budgets are tight and that vision of a redesign might be out of reach.

Of course, not all sites are suited to an evolutionary (as opposed to revolutionary) face lift. Putting lipstick on that 10 year old site with the scrolling marquee, blocky graphics, and green background is probably not a smart investment. But there are many websites with reasonable aesthetics – maybe a few years old – that don’t need to be torn down and rebuilt. Some creative thinking about how existing structural elements can be refined, coupled with a face lift of the home page’s content and, perhaps, key landing pages, can offer real bang for the buck.

Recently, we did just that for the New England Law Library Consortium (NELLCO).

NELLCO Home Page Face Lift

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YAMI-U campaign to launch this afternoon

Published by Jake Goldman on March 31st, 2009 in Clients. 1 Comment

There's No LOL in HIVSince last Wednesday, I’ve been hunkering down at the Hilton Garden Inn in Washington, D.C., leading the web component of Cable Positive’s Youth AIDS  Media Institute University (YAMI-U). The purpose of this 7 day program has been to develop and produce a multi-platform social advocacy HIV/AIDS awareness marketing campaign, working with about 20 young adults already active in various HIV/AIDS awareness campaigns.

Over the past week, we developed an overarching campaign theme that individual YAMI-U teams have translated into public service announcements that will be carried nationwide, a series of print ads, an interactive text messaging campaign, and, yes, an engaging and integrated web presence.

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3 simple examples: why Internet Explorer 8 disappoints web developers

Published by Jake Goldman on March 21st, 2009 in Design & Creative and Featured and Programming. 25 Comments

UPDATE: Paul Thurrott, a Windows journalist, has featured some commentary on our post over at his Winsupersite. Check out his post, and the great discussion below it! Thanks for the input, Paul!

Internet Explorer 8 is out, and a lot of people – technically sophisticated and otherwise – are wondering what, if anything, this means for the web. As professional web developers, our view is that while Internet Explorer 8 is an incremental improvement over its predecessor, we’re mostly disappointed by its lack of progress.

Having read a variety of takes on IE8, we were inspired to write this article for two audiences. First, there’s little in the way of concrete examples and clear explanations for a large swatch of the business technology decision makers (that many of our clients represent) who are often savvy about technology, but look to organizations like us for a deeper understanding of the strategic, cost, and technical significance. Second, reading the comments on tech savvy websites like Neowin, Digg, and the Winsupersite have me concerned that there’s a growing and false notion that IE8 is just great, and its rendering problems are the result of web developers writing non-standard code optimized for IE7.

To understand why IE8 is a legitimate disappointment, we need to start by providing background on how different browsers impact web development, both from a cost and design standpoint. If you think you already have a handle on this, you can skip ahead to our 3 straightforward examples of IE8 disappointments.

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Interactive Flash maps: using web games to teach concepts

Published by Jake Goldman on March 17th, 2009 in Clients and Design & Creative. 0 Comments

Any educator will tell you that the best way to communicate a concept is not just by stating it, but by opening the door for the learner to discover the concept by way of their own experience or reasoning. Science experiments that go on in classrooms across the country are a testament to the importance of knowledge earned through experience, known, in the case of science, as experiments. Learning on the web, often called eLearning, is no different.

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a D.C. based think-tank dedicated to advancing educational excellence in U.S. schools, understands this concept as well as anyone. So when they approached us to help them build an interactive study resource and web based game to illustrate some concepts for their “Accountability Illusion” report, we were excited to get started.

Interactive Flash Maps for Fordham Institute

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Web as part of a greater campaign: economic and philosophic differences

Published by Jake Goldman on March 8th, 2009 in Strategy. 0 Comments

In support of an upcoming conference, we were asked to address some questions on the theme of web strategy as part of a greater campaign. This campaign would also incorporate more traditional media like public service announcements and other branding.

Our inputs addressed issues ranging from consistency in color palette and overall aesthetic, to cost considerations, to social media integration, to  mechanisms for evaluating effectiveness. Most of the discussion would be familiar to any of our clients who have gone through a full development or strategy process with us. As the dialog progressed, however, we found ourselves moving from “planning and campaign integration fundamentals” to the higher level, more philosophical subject of how the web, as a campaign medium, fundamentally differs from other campaign media, and the practical implications of those differences when thinking holistically about web as one leg of a greater campaign.

We could probably write a thesis paper on the subject, but for of the sake of our time and our readers’ attention spans, we’ve tried to boil it down to a handful of paragraphs.

Comparative Campaign Media

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