ratspike ([info]ratspike) wrote,
@ 2008-10-31 14:29:00
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web gurus - help!
I'm trying to help the shelter with their website, getting the domain turned over to them, finding hosting and doing something about the godawfully ugly site itself. Making a new site is easy but finding a way to make the adoptable dog pages simple to update is making my head hurt.

Here's what it looks like now: http://familydogsnewlife.org/dogs.aspx

In a perfect world there'd be a script or something I could plug into the site that's let them choose a photo, type a description, and the script would generate the pages. They're really stuck on keeping this type of format so a regular photo gallery is out of the question, at least for now.

Can anyone suggest anything that might work with a moderate amount of hacking and chopping?

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[info]cambler
2008-10-31 09:44 pm UTC (link)
If you're married to ASP.NET, I can't be much help. If you were starting from scratch, I would have suggested Joomla, giving them a full CMS.

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[info]ratspike
2008-10-31 10:02 pm UTC (link)
Definitely no on the ASP. That's just what's there and it's awful. Because their needs from a website are pretty simple my first thought was to just build everything in plain 'ol html with something plugged in to generate the dog pages, but yeah, I really don't know shit. With enough trial and error cut and paste I can get through customizing Wordpress themes and the like. Would customizing Joomla be totally over my head do you think? The director would like to add a blog and some other things but would Joomla be overkill or can it be as complex or as simple as you need it to be?

I bet you can suggest reliable hosting too. ;)

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[info]cambler
2008-10-31 10:09 pm UTC (link)
Joomla is odd in that the initial learning curve is about a week of steepness, and then it's all gravy.

You could have a full-featured site, complete with blog, forum, gallery and the like in a long weekend. That gets you the 95% solution, and the rest is customization.

But it's PHP, which I suspect you don't know.

Once it's customized, though, they'd be doing all of their editing in the CMS backend, no coding necessary.

http://www.seafartist.com is the SEAF Artist site. All Joomla with customizations.

http://www.TighRoslin.com is a spoof site I did. You're looking at three days of work on that, about 5 hours per day. That includes the blog roll, all content, and even the forum.

But it's like a really powerful power tool in that in the right hands, it's incredibly powerful and easy to use, but in the wrong hands, it'll kill you.

And to frustrate you even more, it's 100% open-source free software.

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[info]ratspike
2008-11-01 01:30 pm UTC (link)
hmmmm...I suspect it would end in tears for me. :D

I found a fantastic Wordpress theme that I'm 99.9% sure would be perfect after some tweaking but the director couldn't really visualize the end result so the idea was mostly shot down. I may just go back to that, build the site and do my best to convince her it's A Good Thing. If I don't then nothing will ever get done.

It just can't ever be simple can it? ;)

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[info]lightworship
2008-11-01 05:00 pm UTC (link)
i know i've said it a hundred times you sir do good work. I know nothing about this sort of thing, i know a web guy i'm going to copy and paste this in an email to him, we'll see if it can be easy.

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