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[etherial]

I'm currently empondering how to design a cromulent website for my game company. doc_smiley and I are at the point where we need to solicit fiction for our seekrit projekt, which requires a website to tell the people we're soliciting that we're not a joke (serious is something we're hoping to strive for next quarter).

Any thoughts?

Comments

[pezzonovante.livejournal.com]

My only suggestion regarding websites is this:

If you're going to use a CMS, don't use one designed for blogging if you're not going to blog.

[etherial.livejournal.com]

Google isn't really giving me any indication what "CMS" stands for in this case, but we're not in the market for anything web 2.0 just yet.

[slarti.livejournal.com]

"Content Management System." As pezzonovante notes, technically blogs count as one, but using blog software to manage non-blog content is an ugly hack and I wouldn't recommend it, either. I do, however, recommend getting and using some sort of CMS if your site comprises more than a couple of pages. That way, you can separate your content from the design of the pages, which cuts down on the amount of time you have to screw around with anything resembling raw HTML code. (There's still some of that, because you or someone still needs to design the templates that the CMS fills with your content, but at least you're not hacking on each page individually all the time.)

As for recommendations... As noted, avoid using blogs for non-blogs, and I'd similarly extend that to not using wikis for non-wiki sites. Be careful and do your research when it comes to PHP-based options, because as a general group they're notoriously rife with security issues, but on the other hand PHP is the most common language for CMSes to be written in. Back when I had a site for the B5 LARP, I used Drupal. It was fairly lightweight and I was able to hack up some custom extensions of my own fairly easily. (Those two factors were especially pronounced compared to Zope/Plone, which had been my first attempt and I discovered that they were Way Too Much Gun.)

Wikipedia has a big long list. Expect to spend a while experimenting before you finally settle down on what you're going to use, and make sure part of that experimentation time is working out your requirements so you can evaluate what best fits your needs.

Bugger that.

[etherial.livejournal.com]

If I want something that complicated, I'll hire someone to build it. I'm just looking for ideas for front page content here.