Part of our website “housekeeping”, or more like, the reason for it, was to update our site to be more web 2.0. This included setting up a blog and connecting it to our site. Matt very quickly found a way to bring the latest postings to our homepage (check the posting), however skinning the blog took us more time. But here it is!
The Before and After
I thought I’d write a post about this topic since Adri and I have had a number of conversations concerning it the past week or so. Templates, as I’m using it here is a reference to what is known as “cookie-cutter” websites, or those websites that you seem to see everywhere on the web with different colors and logos. I certainly have no intentions of dismissing templates, and as a developer I’m probably more ambivalent towards them than Adri who is viewing them through a designer’s eye. Instead my thoughts are to be focused specifically on how the two types of websites compare and the uses of both.
So it’s really not that big of a deal, but after plugging away for many sleepless mornings Adri and I have launched the new site. When we decided to do this, the consensus was to just clean up the code, make it accessible, and more cross-browser friendly (although we are still snagging a few IE problems, but I’m well beyond being surprised by this). It didn’t take long for us to come up with new ideas. All in all it still needs work, but I’m very happy to say that it is to a point where we can reveal it to the world. Albeit a small one. You can check out pukkared here.
We are making some fairly major updates to our website at the moment, one of which includes pulling the postings dynamically from this blog and putting excerpts on the home page of our website. To do this you will need to either use your website host to install wordpress or download wordpress and install it manually on your own server, although do note that wordpress is run on php. The reason I bring this up is because if you are working on a Coldfusion server, as I am, it is most likely that the files just won’t work, or, if they do, they will be a maintenance nightmare.
If you install wordpress via your host, then you will most likely need to contact them to get access to the database. Once you have your host name, user name, and password from your host for your wordpress database you can log in through the phpMyAdmin tool. Once in you can look for your self on how the database is set up and what fields you want to pull to your website. Next you will need to create a dsn to this database. If you have access to your Coldfusion Administrator create it there, or if you are on shared hosting you will probably have to contact your host and have them set up the dsn. Once you have the dsn you should be all set to pull the data the same way you would for a database running locally or on the site’s server.
While cleaning up our site I gave a quick look at a form on our site for potential clients to tell us about themselves and what kind of a product they’re looking for. This quick look became a Saturday morning and more most likely. I found myself clicking blindly away at the general vicinity of radio buttons and check boxes and having to tab through a set of text boxes for a phone number. I couldn’t believe I was forcing my own self to click that tiny little circle in order to activate it.
The good news is that there is a little thing called jQuery that impresses all who encounter it and saves me a lot of time. Now my form is well on its way to a success and pleasure to fill out. I don’t have it back up yet, but should be by weekends end.
Pukkared.com has been stepping up to the web 2.0 plate the last couple days. Visually not much is changing, but behind the scenes these few days of work will save me a few weeks of work in the future. So much planning for flexibility and accessibility is put into our client websites, yet we somehow manage to neglect the most important website we have.
So check it out and imagine the sweet sleekness of the code that will open up countless hours of cooking and running around the house dragging a string for the cats to chase.
At Monserrate Monastery in Bogotá, Colombia.
My name is Matthew. I'm a Software Engineer at Andera in Providence, RI. When I'm not building web applications I'm cooking, hiking, or loving my wife who also happens to be my other professional half. She is a User-interface designer/front-end developer. You can check out her blog here. I also often find myself avoiding eye contact with my cats.
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