Fast Web Design For The Skint Webmaster
T. O' Donnell
About two years ago, I had a go at commercial web site design.
I put a medium-sized ad in a London classified ad paper.
Nothing fancy: "Web designer seeks work ..." etc. This was
expensive, about £500 for a month's run.
Got a few replies. Lesson number one: advertise where clients
of the calibre you want will see it. The clients I got thought
£300 was a lot for a web site. They didn't want to pay web
hosting. They wanted a lot of bang for their buck. 'Mission
creep' was a term I grew to know and loathe.
This set me thinking: how could I give these people all they
could ever want, but not spend a lot of time and money? Lately,
I realised how.
So how can you get a full featured site up in a day? Easy
(ish!).
1. Mambo Content Management System http://mamboserver.com/
I wish I'd found this software a couple of years ago. It's
freeware. The default set-up allows people without web design
skills to update the site. It has a WYSIWYG (What You See Is
What You Get) option. This adds HTML Area code to text input
form fields. Each HTML code input box becomes a mini HTML
editor.
If you can use Microsoft Word, you can add formatted HTML code
to the site.
To get it running you need to know how to install MySQL
databases, or have PHPMyAdmin as part of your web-hosting
package.
You can add articles, edit them, send emails to members, and be
contacted by users.
The only criticisms I have of this software are:
1. The admin interface is confusing. It's all there, just
finding and using it is the problem!
2. You need to search around template sites to find ones suited
to your site purpose. I wanted simple, clean, business ones.
Most of those available seem to have a fat graphic which covers
half the screen. There are more restrained ones out there.
These are minor gripes, compared to the relief of finding what
is essentially a web site in a box. It can be installed in an
hour, once you get familiar with it.
To add ecommerce to your site:
Oscommerce Shopping Cart http://www.oscommerce.com
Again, this is a full-featured, freeware software. You can add
lots of freeware 'plug-ins' to it, to get a professional
shopping cart.
Therein lies the danger. Some of these plug-ins require
altering or overwriting the default cart files. When you try to
upgrade the cart version later, you may 'break' it, by
overwriting a plug-in, thus creating errors.
The trick here is to only install plug-ins that add files
(rather than overwrite them) or that require minor alterations
to existing files.
What I do is download all the versions of the plug-in type I
need e.g. a WYSIWYG editor. I then choose the one which has the
least files, or which creates a new directory for its files. If
it requires that important files be overwritten, or is complex,
I chuck it.
Mambo and Oscommerce. Don't try to integrate them! Hyperlink
from one to the other. I've tried integrations of other
softwares, like PhpBB and PhpNuke. Fine, when it works, but
when you upgrade one or the other, arrgh!
*Keep databases separate*. If one goes skew-whiff, then at
least the other will still work. Same goes for adding chat
rooms and the like. If they're all running off the one
database, and that database becomes corrupted ...
It may offend your sense of tidiness for your visitors to have
to sign up twice at your site, but you'll thank me for this
sage advice later. Remember KISS is the basic rule of computing
(Keep It Simple, Stupid!).
About The Author: T. O' Donnell (
http://www.tigertom.com ) is
an ecommerce consultant and curmudgeon living in London, UK.
His latest project is an ebook on conservatories, available at
http://www.ttconservatories.co.uk.
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