CMS
Web Site Development
is a high
end custom kitchen designer
based in Pinellas Park, Florida.
After maintaining the original
site for several years, South
Island Design working with
Allen Harris Design recently
revamped the site from the
ground up.
In planning for
the new site, it was determined
that there needed to
be more content on the home
page that should change frequently.
The home page teaser articles
should feed from the blog articles,
image galleries and other areas
of interest on the
web site.
The amount of content
on site and the expected maintenance
of it led us to develop
the site with Joomla, a content
management system. Joomla allows
multiple people to work on the
site all at once. So the team
at Kuttler Kitchens can add the
latest article to the Design
Blog, Allen Harris Design can
upload new photos to the Cabinetry
galleries and we can optimize
new pages for the search engines.
The new design
of the Kuttler Kitchens web site
started from a pre-built template.
This allowed development
to proceed at a quicker pace.
The drop down navigation, the
accordion menu in the sub-navigation,
and the photo gallery light
boxes were all existing modules
that installed with the template.
Instead of having to write that
code from scratch or install separate
programs, all we had to do was
tweak the parameters
for our particular
needs.
The Design Blog
is the biggest asset on the site.
A couple of times each week Paul
Anater posts a new article. Once
it's uploaded, a short teaser
automatically appears on the
home page to let the search engines
know fresh content has been added.
The blog software
is also integrated into Joomla
which makes a seamless transition
on the frontend and backend.
The blog was previously housed
on Blogger. It did a good enough
job, but it always felt like
you were leaving the site, even
with a customized template.
One disadvantage
of using Blogger and some of
the other hosted blogs out there
is the lack of control over the
blog software. If the Powers
That Be decide to change your
favorite tool, there's not much
you can do. In Kuttler Kitchens'
case, Blogger decided
to stop supporting FTP publishing
in early May. It probably wouldn't
have been too big a deal to migrate
the blog to a subdomain,
but the lack of control over
your blog can be unnerving. In
Google's defense, Blogger is
free. If you don't like it, don't
use it.
> Visit
KuttlerKitchens.com
>
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