[seco7]

Hello all, I'm wondering if I could get some web publishing advise. It's a new year and I'm in the mood to completely revamp our website. Our current site is 100% flash, but it has proved to be too difficult to keep up-to-date over time, so this time around I was going to go with a regular css site. Any software recommendations? I honestly don't need all the power (or complexity) of Dreamweaver, but is there anything else that can produce professional sites (windows development)?

I was also hoping to add a customer service area to the site where customers could login and get access to order status, document downloads, invoices, etc. This is where I'm out of my experience. I've looked at a couple e-commerce add-ins thinking that this might be the way to go, but I'm not seeing what I was hoping for. Can I do something like this with by linking to MySQL or Access without pulling my hair out? What is the impact from my hosting company on this strategy? They "support" both and any ODBC db really. But am I expecting too much from in-house developement?

Lastly, what is your opinion on corporate blogs as part of sites? I've not had the best opinion of them in the past, but I'm wondering what everyone else thinks. As a customer, would you feel better getting a "behind the scenes" look at the company through personnel blogs?

Thanks,

Steve

[johann.dugge]

My take on corporate blogs (I read one daily and the odd one occasionally) is that they only work if

- you have one or more people who will actually enjoy blogging,
- they are allowed to blog without unreasonable restrictions.

E.g. I expect them to blog when about up's and down's, challenges and achievements just as they occur. If there's only positive stuff it won't help credibility and I would lose interest. Updates should be frequent, if nothing happens for a week and there wasn't many entries to start with (to get a feel for the blog) I wouldn't bother returning.

So my advice would be, if no one is really passionate about the idea of a corporate blog and has the support of your boss, it's not worth the trouble setting one up.

If the conditions are right, it can be a really great way of communicating WITH people. Don't expect to be able to just tell people what to think about you, they will make their opinion (did I already say this?).

[tokiop]

Hello Steve,

for your website it depends of you content quantity, but I would suggest to use a CMS (content management system), furthermore if you are thinking about adding individual or collective blog to it. It will help you to modify pages, manage medias, create various users to modify specific pages or manage their blog.. The content can then be published in html/css, or in flash for example.

I personnaly work with "SPIP" http://www.spip.net/rubrique25.html which allows very flexible layouts and data structure, private acces on some pages for your clients..

For html/css edition I would recomend to use a txt editor with syntax coloring, such as NotePad++, which provide direct control of your code. Dreamweaver and such may look simpler but don't help to understand structure and semantics, and include a lot of unnecessary clumsy code (IMO not professional site !).

[-Adrian]

I completely agree with tokiop, that's good advice right there.

[seco7]

Wow, I have to admit that this is exactly opposite of what I expected to receive. I'll look into it more ...

Can it go beyond webzine-type sites? Just glancing over some of the faq and forum messages it looks like it was definitely developed for this specific purpose.

[tokiop]

Yes, it is designed for webzine, but you can understand it as media/users/documents/database management system, once it is installed on your webdesign you can control everything online, from the admin side. SPIP has the advantage not to have a "static" structure, so it can adapt to any website, but it is possible other CMS better suit you needs.

for example, flash portfolio: http://www.forecyclings.com/?lang=en
html website: http://www.martine-caillat.com/

If you think about corporate blogs, it can be useful to manage the whole website from one "editor".

Do you have a link to your current website ?