Posts Tagged ‘Design’

ModX – My CMS of Choice

Saturday, March 6th, 2010

For the longest time, I searched for a content management application that I could use for all my sites that worked great, was easy to install and easy to use for both the designer (me) and my clients. After playing with Joomla, WordPress, Drupal and a few others I’m happy to say that I’ve settled on ModX. There are many reasons why I settled on ModX but the first and foremost is how easy it is to template. You create your html and css just like you would for a static site, copy the code, paste it in ModX, add a few simple tags such as [*content*] and your site is up and running. Honestly. I’m not a programmer. I struggled with just about every other system I tried. Nothing just worked until ModX.

So, with the good, there is always some bad, right? Well, so far, not much bad. Let’s just say inconvenient. The main drawback really is the lack of plugins that just work right out of the box. I’ve found quite a good list of solutions that I’m not really starting to understand, but compared to Joomla or WordPress, ModX is miles behind. But what I’ve found is that for most of my clients that really just want a nice site up that they can add to and edit, there is nothing better than ModX. Most of the sites I’m making now have news, calendar events, photo galleries and more and ModX is doing the trick.

Take a look at a few of the sites I’ve done recently. My ModX skills are getting better with each new site I complete.

I’ve done even more, but this is a good showing of what I’ve done since finding ModX.  I love creating 1 or 2 templates and then creating all of the pages right in ModX. So easy when I need to update something on the entire site. A quick change on the template and the whole site is updated.

Look for more information about ModX and what’s going on at my new design studio – Big Pixel Studio. Justin and I have been so busy our first year together that we just have so little time to do much other than client work. I’m also planning on actually updating and maintaining this blog a bit more as well. I may even switch it over to a ModX site. Not sure yet. ModX can certainly handle blogging, but nothing like good old WordPress.

I want my site to come up on the first page of Google….

Sunday, May 3rd, 2009

Yeah? So do I. And, it’s getting harder and harder to make that happen. More web sites come online every day. .com addresses are harder and harder to come by. Search engine optimization changes all of the time. So, how can you make search engines work for your small business? You can hire a top notch SEO (search engine optimization) company, but as a small business that can get very expensive. Many SEO companies charge more than you will have paid to create your entire site. Or, you can share this article with your web designer and work together to come up with a plan to get more traffic to your site. Here are a few tips:
(more…)


Entries (RSS) and Comments (RSS)