Reloaded: www.njcases.com
March 22, 2007 • (1) Comments
Today we relaunched http://www.njcases, a design freshener for long-time client Tim Howes.
This project involved new graphics and typography, new navigation, and some devilish under-the-covers trickeration using ExpressionEngine, Tim’s CMS of choice. We layered the whole thing atop the Yahoo YUI foundation for cross-browser success, coded to a Strict HTML 4.01 DTD, and as always, no tables were abused in the creation of this website.
This screencap above links to the live site.
One thing I observed again is how ExpressionEngine provides a lot of power at the expense of its inscrutable documentation. That hasn’t changed much for the better over the four years that EE has been available, although I discovered a growing aftermarket of third-party zen masters who blog tips and tutorials that the documentation doesn’t cover.
The publisher’s position seems to be that there are simply too many ways to accomplish most common tasks for them to spend any time anticipating typical “best practices” and building out use cases in the documentation. That said, I’ve been building sites atop their products since pMachine Pro and have found them to be completely generous with advice in the product’s Support Fora. Unfortunately, you’ve got to know what question to ask in the Forum to get anywhere close to a remedy and most questions are answered over and over and over. A companion wiki does little but repeat the official line about flexibility.
Anyway, I’m gearing up to develop four or five new satellite sites to see how they aid Tim’s search rankings and will use the opportunity get plenty of EE hands-on experience in the weeks ahead.