Blueprint & jQuery – Case study
I have been working with Stefan for more than two years now and he writes a very useful blog: Divito Design. It’s there that I found a very good post about BluePrint grid – after quite some more reading, I used it to revamp an ‘old’ 2001 site – and wrote an article about how it helped me creating a W3C compliant and browser compatibile site – sharing it with you here: case study – I hope it is as useful to you as Stefan’s article was to me – comments welcome!
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Well of course I understand about half of what is written in your blogpost. What fascinates me is that it IS possible to revamp “old” websites. This is good news: too often I’m told that it’s better to scrap the existing site.
Therefore: well done, Jacques !
@ Ewout Wolff:
Thank you, Ewout – the first official comment on my blog!
“This is good news: too often I’m told that it’s better to scrap the existing site”
The short answer: nonsense!
The (slightly) longer answer: it all depends.
As pointed out in the case study, the site uses “old” plain HTML pages (not database generated .php) – and some CSS, just not fully; also, tables are used for ‘formatting’ – definitely a no-no for HTML-purists, as tables are intended for presenting data only – not for keeping your code in place.
More importantly, consider the (intended) function of your site. In this case, it is an ‘online brochure’ – hardly any updates, no blog. So why using a CMS with all its overhead: maintenance (even if you never post anything, you still need to update the software…) and vulnerabilities… Regular HTML pages with clean code are stable and need no updating – so, they will perfectly do!
Of course, it doesn’t sound too TwentyTen, so that is why they want to sell (you) a CMS, but it is often overkill. Sure, for online stores (catalogs) and frequently updated sites, you might want to look into Drupal or Joomla – but prepare yourself for a steep learning curve – or additional expenses for the expert-coder.
Which is why I prefer WordPress – of which those ‘experts’ then state that it is not a real CMS. Well, you be the judge here: Gerbera.org – built in WP, no posts, as every article is a static page. I need to be able to add articles in a structured way (layout, code and SEO!), they need to be organised in the menu (navigation!) and I should be able to add functionality (plugins) and perhaps a blog in the future. Before I converted it to WP, I needed to copy the HTML page, strip the content, put in the new article, making sure I used the correct tags, adding it to the menu, uploading it etc etc. It’s now about 200 pages, and growing – I now only need to add content (instead of code and files).
My point: discuss with your web consultant what you need now – and in the future. But most of all: do some research and find out what you like or not – based on that you can avoid endless discussions – and useless advise like scrapping your current site!