by Duncan

I wear the hat of a Web Developer/Designer at Young Adult Cancer Canada (YACC). And while I fill both roles, I’m truly a more capable web designer than web developer. I can put together a full CMS in PHP/MySQL, I can configure an Apache server, but I am more at home creating text-styles with CSS and images in PhotoShop than I am scripting functionality.

So when we started building this new website, I looked to an off-the-shelf CMS to provide the core functionality for the site. I’ve used WordPress, MovableType, and a few more obscure publishing engines in the past but this time I pushed to try ExpressionEngine. It’s commercial software so it actually costs money, but, in terms of savings in HR time and in terms of support, it’s paid for itself many many times over.

I remember the first few times I tried to skin a site with WordPress. It was an absolute nightmare. Quite literally days spend staring at confusing markup trying to figure out how to use it. I’m sure it can be done faster; with experience I’m sure I could cut that time by three quarters. But at the end of the day, WP is designed to publish a blog. Beyond that, you can extend it to do a whole lot more but that becomes progressively more complicated, and more and more of a hack.

ExpressionEngine by contrast, is a dream to work with. I can drop a HTML/CSS file into a template and in an afternoon, I can have a fully working, database driven website.

What’s more impressive is the level of support that EE boasts. Most of the support happens on their forums which I was initially skeptical about, but, I posted an issue to the technical support forum at noon. Six hours later, their support team had reproduced the bug, identified a workaround, written a fix for the bug, sent me a copy of it, and slated it for inclusion in the next release.

By contrast, when we find a similar issue with another unnamed vendor, the response to the phone call we make to them is “Right. We knew that was a bug, and we haven’t fixed it yet. We will at some [interminate] point in the future.” They might suggest some clumsy workaround, or just recommend we don’t use a particular feature.

In short: ExpressionEngine is helping us get a little closer to doing the what’s really important, and less on the technical issues that crop along the way.

Posted on Aug 28, 2009 - 08:30 PM

by Duncan

2009 has seen a whole lot of changes for Young Adult Cancer Canada: We’ve grown to seven employees in the office, significantly expanded the Shave, the Retreat, launched a Workshop, and the biggest Conference to date this fall.

We also completely redesigned and rebuilt our website. While it’s been a long process, we’re slowly launching all of the new features we’ve been planning for ever so long. The latest to go live is the search function that’s found a new home at the top of the blue bar.

This search is built on the core Expression Engine functionality which searches through the close to 700 pages of content we’ve published to date on the web to find what you’re looking for. We’ll be publishing substantially more in the future, as we develop some processes internally to make that happen.

Terms can be excluded from the search with a “-” in front of the term, for example: Geoff - Eaton

Exact phrases can be searched by enclosing them in quotes, for example: “Geoff Eaton”

There’s lot’s more to come in the near future, so stay tuned!

Posted on Aug 28, 2009 - 08:28 PM

by Duncan

Earlier this month, we sent out our first email newsletter, Up to Here.

Pretty normal for an organization to send out a periodic newsletter. What’s cool about this one however, is that we didn’t actually do anything to send it. No one in the office compiled articles, edited them, formatted the HTML, and hit send in our email marketing software (we’re using MailChimp: though it’s known as ‘Coco’ or ‘MonkeyChimp’ around the office).

It sent itself automatically. It drew 2-3 posts from each of the feeds we have up on our site, chose the ones that were most popular over the last 31 days, and sent it out. And, it’ll continue to do so, every month without interaction from us, though decidedly with tweaks here and there.

Mailchimp is integrated with our Google Analytics account, so, we can pretty easily see the effect of traffic from the first issue of Up to Here on our website: that’s what the screen shot shows: we’ve had 333 visits to our website as a result of the email, 14 per cent or so our total traffic over the past month. Not to shabby.

The greatest benefit is that it allows us in the office to put more time into our programs and, thus, more time into making them successful. We all know how much time a simple task like a newsletter can require: a meeting to brainstorm some ideas, followup meetings to monitor progress of content, tracking it down, formatting it, figuring out the list, printing it, stuffing the envelopes. Up to Here requires none of those; we just need to be focused on communicating our programs well on the web, something that we’d have to do regardless.

Posted on Aug 25, 2009 - 01:04 AM