Microsoft Expression site - revisited.

sheardp · #1 (**permalink**) 11-16-2006, 10:39 AM

I meant to post this in reply to a review of an earlier version of our site, but I pressed the wrong button. I cannot remove it now, so I may as well add some more information. If anyone would like to see the site, the URL is http://www.vanware.co.uk.

Since our first attempt, we have learned a lot more about CSS, php and mySql, and we have given our site a complete makeover. This time we have used our own template, rather than one that came with Expression. We looked at what other sites were doing, in terms of white space and so on, and went with the flow.

The company weblog at http://www.vanware.co.uk/wordpress is an interesting attempt to use blogging software for content management. Again the customization is entirely our own, and we do not use a theme.

The only webbot that we still use id for the site search. Apart from this, our break with FrontPage is complete. We would like to add a search facility to the weblog too, but without a theme that is problematic.

**incrediblehelp** · #2 (**permalink**) 11-21-2006, 01:16 PM

I wouldnt name the sub-directory for your blog "wordpress". You may want to change the CMS down the road.

sheardp · #3 (**permalink**) 11-22-2006, 05:48 AM

CMS stands for Content Management System, right? Well the URL only appears once, in the Expression DWT (Dynamic Web Template). Are not these abbreviations irritating? But then made up words like blog are even worse.

The blog page itself is heavily customized. We do not use a theme. Indeed we cannot, because the page is part of the Expression web, and uses the same DWT. The whole blog is hand coded, using WP functions. If we moved away from WP, we would have to start again, from scratch.

Our support team just love the new weblog, and our customers seem to like it too. Before, they had a separate support site, that they maintained using FrontPage. But it always fell into disuse, when people were too busy to look after it.

Now they can just dash of a new post whenever they want to. It also means that they no longer have to send long emails to lots of different customers. We plan to migrate all our customer support to this format.

**incrediblehelp** · #4 (**permalink**) 11-22-2006, 02:13 PM

I am just saying it would not make much sense to name your BLOG subfolder after the name fo the software that runs your blog. What if you move to MoveableType or Blogger down the road?