Web design for non-profit
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@scottalanmiller said:
Ah, that's not really related. If you are hiring a web designer, they do the design. If you want your person to be the designer, you don't hire a designer.
Agreed.
Why are you consider hiring someone if the goal is for the existing person to keep doing it even if she doesn't know how?
I'm not looking to hire someone, and I'm unsure how you came to that conclusion. I am seeking the community's input on design tools that could be used by the NP to build and maintain their own site.
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@g.jacobse Thanks!
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@Danp said:
but the real issue is that they need another option for building / maintaining the website. Here's their website if anyone is interested: http://www.arc-gateway.org/. They don't currently sell anything through the site, but that could change in the future.
What alternatives are out there that I can review / recommend to them. Appreciate any input.
Ah, it sounded like they didn't know web design and this question was about hiring someone. Nothing said that, but nothing said that you were looking for tools either. When getting a website designed, it's a designer that I need. If they can do the design, seems like they'd already know what tools they like.
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The problem with design tools is that designers don't use them. These days effectively all web design is done via templates on content management systems. That makes traditional style design tools pretty difficult to make and keep working. In some ways design is so much easier and in other ways so much more complex today.
But nearly no one designs their own site. You would either hire a full time designer or you would purchase a template that is already designed for you.
We often use ThemeForest for ours.
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@scottalanmiller They've been using the D&D "builder" from 1&1. Looks like bluehost.com (the free host through GrassRoots.org) offers something similar.
I'll have to take a closer look at the various CMS offerings to determine if they would be too difficult for her to use.
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C5 will be the easiest for someone non-technical to use, especially if you setup permissions right. WordPress is a little more involved, and more likely to be hacked.
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@Danp said:
@scottalanmiller They've been using the D&D "builder" from 1&1. Looks like bluehost.com (the free host through GrassRoots.org) offers something similar.
Dungeons and Dragons Builder? I'm in. Sign me up
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@Danp said:
I'll have to take a closer look at the various CMS offerings to determine if they would be too difficult for her to use.
I've not used the one that @thecreativeone91 recommends but mostly have used WordPress for more than a decade, I think. It's pretty easy to use and for most users if all you need is a template it can be as simple as picking one out and selecting it. You can choose a new one anytime and change "instantly" between them. Updating the content is dead simple as it is not connected to the design in any way.
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Be careful when selecting templates.
Some are horribly designed, which can lead to poor performance and load time. Read reviews, look at performance benchmarks on themes, don't pick purely on looks alone.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
Be careful when selecting templates.
Some are horribly designed, which can lead to poor performance and load time. Read reviews, look at performance benchmarks on themes, don't pick purely on looks alone.
It's not as bad with C5, but I think they might review themes. Wordpress is prone to having poor performance. Using Cache and CloudFlare is a must.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
It's not as bad with C5, but I think they might review themes. Wordpress is prone to having poor performance. Using Cache and CloudFlare is a must.
Good recommendations anyway.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
It's not as bad with C5, but I think they might review themes. Wordpress is prone to having poor performance. Using Cache and CloudFlare is a must.
My own site is pretty crap out of the box. Even with Cloudflare and caching enabled to fix it, it's still not fast.
You look at other WP sites that load almost instantly, 90% of the time it's the theme rather than something else.
GTmetrix.com is pretty helpful as a benchmark tool to see what they have done.
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Yes, but what I'm saying is Wordpress has poor performance to begin with. It's code is poorly done so you have to be super careful about anything you do on it. @tonyshowoff could post more on that I think.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
It's not as bad with C5, but I think they might review themes. Wordpress is prone to having poor performance. Using Cache and CloudFlare is a must.
My own site is pretty crap out of the box. Even with Cloudflare and caching enabled to fix it, it's still not fast.
You look at other WP sites that load almost instantly, 90% of the time it's the theme rather than something else.
GTmetrix.com is pretty helpful as a benchmark tool to see what they have done.
I moved from hosting in house to ASO and the speed went up a lot.
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@scottalanmiller said:
I moved from hosting in house to ASO and the speed went up a lot.
More RAM for SQL or just a better connection I wonder?
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@thecreativeone91 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
I moved from hosting in house to ASO and the speed went up a lot.
More RAM for SQL or just a better connection I wonder?
Neither seems likely as we made sure to always have plenty of memory overhead that wasn't being touched, even by the cache mechanisms. And our connection was never being touched. Likely other parts of the setup.
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It's not my host, vanilla WP sites run fine. It's just my theme.
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Oh okay. We found with the same theme moving from one to the other would be noticeably different in performance.
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Template driven sites seem to function better.
Until it was removed from my task list, I was using Joomla! for the office(not last - one prior). I had several modules added for Facebook and such. I picked up a license for Artisteer to create my own templates and such. It was turning out pretty well until they decided to go to WordPress.
Don't fault them, Just felt that WP was more of a bloggers CMS.
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@g.jacobse said:
Don't fault them, Just felt that WP was more of a bloggers CMS.
Still is, I think. The focus is really around blogging and other things are extensions or add ons. It's generally a good platform, but it is heavily designed around the blog format. I mean for the first many years the idea of using it for anything except a blog was unheard of.
