News:: The Dry Cleaning and Laundry Skillsnet
The Dry Cleaning and Laundry Skillsnet provides training and information to their members courtesy of funding from the Department of Trade, Enterprise and Employment.
SeeIT and CIC were contracted to provide a web site providing:
- a simple user registration system
- private content for members
- a web site where the administrator can add and update content themselves
- a simple bulletin board/forum for registered users
The main issue here was to design web site that was easy to navigate and clear for non-computer literate users.
News:: New website for SeeIT!
At long last - today the new website goes live!
SeeIT.org is built on our own content management system (CMS), using PHP and MySQL along with some excellent Open Source tools. Our CMS is simple, flexible and extensible.
Contact us for more information or to arrange a consultation. For more information, see our blog post 'A Reluctant Web Designers Journey'.
News:: www.TASCQ.ie
In conjunction with Concept Information Consulting we have finished the new website for TASCQ (Traders in the Area Supporting the Cultural Quarter).
TASCQ (a.k.a. www.visit-templebar.ie and www.visit-templebar.com) is an information portal for TASCQ members and for tourists. With over 60 member businesses and a comprehensive events guide, it generates quite a lot of traffic and requires frequent updates. With such dynamic content you need a database at the back end or updates become painful. Furthermore the database backed model allows for all sorts of functionality for visitors (such as the ability to search for events) and members (like having their own login and private members area).
SeeIT managed back-end development (database and PHP server-side programming) while CIC managed the project and front-end development (HTML templates and CSS files).
News:: Performance Marketing redesign
Performance Marketing market!
They wanted a web site that marketed them. SeeIT and CIC developed a database backed dynamic web site that would increase their search engine rankings and allow them to easily update and add new information to their web site.
Typical functions include:
- staff can add or edit content on the site.
- staff can manage downloads for web site visitors.
- the admin user can manage users and groups.
- their clients all have their own login and private page. Staff can add content and file downloads to these private pages.
- all queries and form submissions are logged and can be reported at any time.
- users get email notifications when they have new private content.
- and more...
The nett result is a more informative web site, where content is easier to find and access. The whole look and feel of the web site is managed through one main template and several sub-templates - a new page will inherit the same look and feel of the existing pages.
The old web site was a collection of static pages (numbering in their hundreds) and had outlived its usefulness. Once you have over 10 pages of content on your web site, you should have it backed by a database.
In fact we would argue that you should use a database and some form of CMS immediately - why wait? Within a very short time you will certainly want to add or change some content on your web site and you certainly don't want to have to pay a web designer to do something so trivial.
Life can be that simple!
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Blog:: Open Source and Open Standards
Recently we were asked by a client to migrate a web site from one server to another. The web site in question was built on a Content Management System (CMS) called Joomla - a CMS written in PHP and using MySQL for database storage.
I am not fond of Joomla, but that is my personal opinion and don't let it colour yours. As a programmer I find it heavyweight and overly complex. Lots and lots of code means frequent discoveries of bugs and frequent updates. As my friend Alan Kennedy says "every line of code is a liability" and he is spot on. However we aren't all programmers and for someone who wants an "out of the box" experience Joomla may well fit the bill. Personally I prefer the excellent Wordpress - it may be a 'only' a blog system, but it is fantastic for static web sites too and uses a much simpler database schema, although it doesn't have the extended functionality of Joomla.
Open Standards - your data, your way
Where am I going with all this? Well what happens when the person you used to create your web site disappears, or when you just want to migrate? If you are stuck into a commercial, closed source and/or proprietary model, you are at the mercy of whatever commercial provider will take you on. If, on the other hand, you are using open standards, then at the very least you have access to all the code and data in your web site.
Blog:: A Reluctant Web Designers Journey
A long overdue of SeeITs' website. My colleague Simon Stewart in CIC made the very valid point that a web programmer should show something more on his website than a page of largely static text and a broken contact form. (In fairness the contact form brought me nothing but spam and Asian software companies trying to get me to outsource my coding jobs to them, so it was no great loss to me.)
One pleasant surprise was how modern browsers behave with standards compliant HTML and CSS (as long as you don't get too funky with your layout).