Jack Born On Marketing, Online Business, and PHP Code

One of my best clients hired me to take a disjointed old site and turn it into a dynamic site that was easy to navigate and easy to update.

As I worked my way through the project, I found myself calling upon almost every trick in the book that I had ever come across. Here is a partial list:

• AJAX
• Output buffering
• Force Type for nice urls
• Javascript DOM
• Zebra striping on some of the tables
• Server side cleaning of Microsoft Word and Internet Explorer garbage code that comes when the client copies and pastes into the web based content editor

At the risk of straining my elbow patting myself on the back… I am particularly proud of my use of AJAX on the site to make it more user friendly. Initially I was using iframes to generate some of the content but I was able to combine PHP output buffering with a spinkle of AJAX to get a much better outcome.

At the beginning of the project, I presented my client with two choices of CMS. I knew that they wouldn’t want to use the one I had created for my other clients and my own sites (as nice as it is) because they kept mentioning they wanted to be able to continue on uninterrupted in the unfortunate event that I were hit by a falling piano, meteroid, or milk truck.

For the security of the client, I won’t divulge which one they went with, but I will say that as good as the CMS was, it was lacking some major components that I had to add in to make it more user friendly.

I still can’t believe how little progress has been made with open source CMS products (or closed ones, for that matter) over the years that I’ve been building websites and marketing systems for clients.

This same frustration is what led me to create Ultimate Form Mail a year and a half ago: failure to find anything in the marketplace, free or paid, that did the job the way I wanted it done.

But I digress.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 20th, 2006 at 1:36 pm and is filed under Programming, Web Design . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.