- Image via Wikipedia
For the last few months I’ve been on the WordPress train. This is a pretty big step from my background as an ASP.NET programmer. I know,and trust me – the nightmares came back when I found out php was TOO much like classic asp. 
Why WordPress? I think it is a brilliant platform. I have never seen anything quite like it. From the elegance and completeness of the platform to the insane dedication of the community…it’s comm-plee-teet. And please do not get me started on the plugins. It took me a month to find something no one else had built yet to learn how to build one?
So what…you like it Tom, ok – I get it.
That brings us to iowa.com. I work at Gazette Communications in the WebDev group. We’ve been working with a team of are trying to break free of the traditional media ties and begin to make new roads (at least of old media people) on the “internets”.
There are many plans laid for what iowa.com will be – basically they can be put into two categories: content or engine. The engine part is most exciting for me – we have a calendar engine, a blogging engine and a few more which we have to keep under wraps for a bit. This is very cool and it is letting the WebDev geeks get some kung-fu going, but that is not the part that has me worried.
It’s the content that worries me. Yea – content. Why, we’ll it was my suggestion we used WordPress in setting up the site. Then I had another brilliant idea – enter all content into the site as pages, I hope that one doesn’t come back to haunt me. I only figured out a month later that pages in WordPress cannot be categorized. (Now, in perfect WP community fashion – there is a solution to this problem.)
So here we are – the site is pushing 125 pages now…I used to think think that was big, but then I realized this site has 300+ posts. If things get nutty – we can always leverage WP-Cache, and that should solve any of the serving issues.
I’ll keep you up to date – just keep me informed if you take a look at the site…please be honest. Also – I’m looking to talk to anyone else who is using WordPress as a CMS and hopefully with some fairly significant traffic.
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Looking forward to seeing what you come up with for iowa.com. I’m a big proponent of Wordpress as a news publishing platform.
Tom,regarding your blog about textures on web sites, I would be interested to hear your thoughts on making web sites that aren’t flat or mirror digital examples of printed pages but something more 3-dimensional. Are most sites still flat because of designers lack of vision, technology issues, cost, bandwidth issues? If we are going to truly engage people in a different form than print shouldn’t we be trying to create sites that look/feel different than print and utilize the advantages of a digital platform?
I wouldn’t go as far as 3-D, but we have come to a point in time where it’s OK to “spend” some of the extra size to get something that really looks nice.
Now with everything – too much of a good thing is too much. Here are a few sites which I feel take advantage of the happy space between.
http://marylandmedia.com/
This site as a “handwriting” style. It is cool, it doesn’t look like a “processed” site. But this is really a blog. It may not look like it – but it’s a wordpress blog. Check out the cool sliding “featured” section.
http://www.revolutiontwo.com/demo/album.html
This is a killer blog theme too. Notice the two layered background. Not only the texture, but then laying the translucent “glass” over for the second layer. The other thing that is “new” is just going for high quality pictures, instead of just small sized to conserve bandwidth.
http://www.chemistryrecruitment.com/contact
We have to get creative on forms too – let’s not stop at cool looking websites!
I like the idea of being able to personalize the site by changing background colors, fonts etc. like the revolutiontwo.com site. How much work is it to have the little pop up with the text/photo when you cursor over a link before you click on it? I like those as well so you can read/see what the story/link is before going to it.
What in your opinion constitutes going too far on site design? Putting in so much that no one with less than 20 mbps download width would be unable to use it? How do you know when you’ve gone past the happy medium?
“text/photo pop-ups”
Those are cool Rob, but unfortunately advertising jerks have abused those so they are almost unusable. There is a super cool site called http://www.apture.com/, I just hope the concept hasn’t been ruined by people getting too concerned about making dollars instead of engaging community.
How much is too much:
That is hard to say. You have to do user testing and see what people think of it. It’s about finding a “happy place”.
[...] wrestling with the changes and not just a few who are championing the “content” focus Tom Altman provides a good case in point. Tom, one of my web developers, is spot on when talking a technical [...]
Love your post!! Finally someone got it right!!! Would you mind if I put a blogroll link back to your post?