That new MovableType site I’ve been working on and talking about is up!
It’s the new website for the Marti Nelson Cancer Foundation, a wonderful grassroots organization that helps connect cancer patients with possibly life-extending drugs they wouldn’t otherwise have access to. These are great people to work with, and I enjoyed this project.
Their old site was very difficult to navigate, table-heavy and static. In addition to refreshing the look, my number one goal here was to make the site consistent, logical and easy to update. This is essential for an organization that must delivery cutting-edge news easily. I considered Macromedia Contribute to allow the client to update their own content, but in the end settled on MovableType because:
# The client can log in from any web browser and edit copy in a standard text window. I was concerned that Contribute wouldn’t render the pages properly which would cause some confusion.
# Changing templates on a Contribute site is a pain, since you have to download the entire site, make the change and then upload again so you don’t end up overwriting changes the client has made. In MovableType, I can change a static area of a template and it has no effect on the existing content as long as I don’t change the template tags.
# Right now, one client is making changes on the site. That may not always be the case. It’s a trivial matter to add authors/features to the site without an additional software investment. Contribute is $99 per seat.
# Easier troubleshooting. My client is in Oregon. I’m in Connecticut. If she’s having a problem editing a page, I can log in via my PC and see exactly what she does. It would be far more difficult for me to help her troubleshoot an issue with stand-alone software.
The fun part was deciding which pages had to be entries (and therefore client editable) and which were okay to put in index templates (which the client does not have access to). Each major section of the site is a separate blog, with its own configuration. I linked the templates back to a “templates” folder on the server and used includes wherever possible so making a change across all 6 blogs was as easy as changing a single file, upload, rebuild.
Related posts:
- C3 has a new website!
Considering that I’ve been waiting over a year to be... - WordPress 2.3
Although WordPress 2.3 came out nearly a week ago, I... - May Adobe Contribute CS3 die a slow and painful death
That was a fun way to spend an afternoon. Not.... - Women & Cancer Magazine profiles C3
A few months ago, Women & Cancer Magazine contacted me... - A View from Wordpress? Thinking about it.
I started this blog on Movable Type version 2.0.something in...
