10 replies to this topic

[Mr Biggles]

We are working on a CMS system that is hosted by the company that provided the web site.

One of the things we are noticing is just how restrictive a lot of these CMS are.

This one puts the company name as the title at the start of every page and there is no way to prevent this, we also have to go back to the web designers every 5 mins when we want something, even if its very basic.

They are nice enough people etc however we are used to having full control and it is so much more difficult this way.

Is my assumption right that this will hurt our chances of ranking for any decent keywords, mainly because every page title will have "OUR GREAT COMPANY NAME; KEY PHRASES"

I dont see the point in this as they will get and have number one ranking for their company name anyway. Plus I think it is less likely to get clicked on when displayed in search engines (From my own personal preference)

[qwerty]

I like getting some branding into the title of each page, but only if there's room for it, and more often than not I'll put it at the end of the tag rather than the beginning. If you can't get the developers to change that setting, I guess your options are to either live with it or convince the client to dump the CMS.

I tried doing the latter of those a few weeks ago. The client had hired a developer to build a custom CMS for their site, which would contain about 20 pages plus a WordPress blog. When they hired me, I took a look at the code being generated by the CMS and told the client that it would save them a lot of time and money if they let me recreate those pages in static HTML, or just use WP as the CMS for the whole site. They decided to stick with what they've got, and I've now spent weeks sending long lists of code changes to the developer. We haven't even gotten started on silly things like keywords or content.

[Jill]

If the name of the site isn't TOO long, it's fine at the beginning.

Qwerty, curious what sorts of code changes you needed them to change. I cannot fathom asking a client to take a nice dynamically generated site with a CMS and put it into old fashioned static HTML pages in this day and age.

It must have been a really HORRID CMS

[qwerty]

The CMS isn't some known package. It was created by this guy using MS Visual Studio, and it seems to be a work in progress. The WYSIWYG is pretty straightforward -- a lot like the editor in Wordpress, but it'll throw content into a <span> for no reason whatsoever, it seems to randomly associate named styles with content without those styles being defined by the CSS, and generally creates about 3 or 4 times more code than it needs to. On top of that, there's a growing list of items I've asked him to simply delete from pages, to which he's responded that they simply can't be deleted. Ever. What do these things that can't be deleted do? Nothing. They take up space. But they can't be deleted.

For example, for a list, each item of which also contains a list, it generated four lists, each containing one item with a bunch of line breaks and hard spaces to create the nested lists -- not even one list with a bunch of line breaks within the list items, but a separate list for each list item.

It's like this:

HTML

<ul>
<li>Item<br />
-Subitem <br />
-Subitem<br />
-Subitem</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Item <br />
-Subitem <br />
-Subitem<br />
-Subitem</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Item <br />
-Subitem <br />
-Subitem <br />
-Subitem<br />
-Subitem</li>
</ul>

all nested in a ton of formatting, instead of

HTML

<ul>
<li>Item
<ul>
<li>Subitem</li>
<li>Subitem</li>
<li>Subitem</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Item
<ul>
<li>Subitem</li>
<li>Subitem</li>
<li>Subitem</li>
<li>Subitem</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Item
<ul>
<li>Subitem</li>
<li>Subitem</li>
<li>Subitem</li>
<li>Subitem</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>

[Jill]

True. Waste of space and bytes.

But so what?

[qwerty]

It means slow loading time, cross-browser compatibility issues, trouble getting the page to look the way you want it to, stuff like that. They may as well be creating pages in Word and saving them as HTML.

[Catz]

They may as well be creating pages in Word and saving them as HTML

Talk about some messed up code!

[Mooro]

@jill - 'so what'

Accessibility = Disability Descrimination Act.

Professionalism = good markup = easy to work with

Performance = faster browsing experience with less clutter to decypher

To me (at least) markup matters. If any dev presented me with poor markup I'd kick them back to the stone age.

The way I see it is if you're paying someone to craft your website for you they need to be a craftsman or craftswoman. Markup is a fundamental part of the craft.

WP is so extensible it really negates the need for a custom CMS.

[davebob spongepants]

To me (at least) markup matters. If any dev presented me with poor markup I'd kick them back to the stone age.

The way I see it is if you're paying someone to craft your website for you they need to be a craftsman or craftswoman. Markup is a fundamental part of the craft.

WP is so extensible it really negates the need for a custom CMS.

If by WP you are talking about WordPress I would strongly disagree. We build loads of web sites with Drupal and WP and I would never use WP as some sort of "full blown" CMS. I can't recall the number of times we have had to shift clients from "hacked" WP web sites someone tried to build into something much bigger than it was intended and save them from the huge security problems the developers dropped them into by toying with the core code of WP and then negating all future security updates.

WordPress is a blog software and sometimes can be used to build a pretty decent web site with some nice features - but a lot of the "extensible" pieces you are talking about have been built without regard to security updates.

[chrishirst]

Sounds like a typical Visual Studio "developer"

"Look! I click this shiny button and it automagically adds [insert name of badly coded "server object"] to the page! WAAAAAy Kewl!"






Cynical?


Me???

[MaryKrysia]

The worst program code I have ever seen was in Visual Studio - a true waste of time and space, much like MS Font Page.

Maybe Microsoft has penchant for excessive and "bulky" program code?