Sentori email marketing software website

[Deak]

Although I love making websites with CMS Made Simple, my actual day job is as a .NET developer for Sentori -- a web-based email marketing tool. We built our own website using CMS Made Simple (1.7.1 currently).

Link

http://www.sentori.co.uk/

The site was built using Coda (of course) and making heavy use of the TemplateExternalizer module. The design is built on Nathan Smith's 960 grid system, XHTML, CSS3, and jQuery. Before any CSS2 or CSS3 was done, we used YUI reset (which I prefer to Meyer's) and base.

Features

One of our main goals for the site was to make each page look "designed", rather than something a content management system had spat out (i.e. with a single area where editable content appears causing pages to look very similar). To achieve this we have numerous content blocks on most pages and 5 page Templates. We also have smarty logic in our Templates to make particular blocks only display if they have content. There's a newsletter sign up, but this has a few kinks and will be removed. It's made using FormBuilder and will shortly be replaced with a Sentori sign-up form, which, obviously, we use for our own email marketing!

Our homepage pulls the latest blog posts (and the number of comments) and our Twitter posts. We have a featured content slider, where the slides are a simple bulleted list when editing -- so very easy to update.

Typography for the H1, H2, and H3 is handled using cufón image replacement.

Our blog has a lot of template customisation; I had a very definite idea of what I wanted it to look and behave like. This probably took the most time our of anything on the website. We have comments (with captcha) and RSS.

All contact forms are made with FormBuilder and log submissions in various text files stored outside of the public HTML folder.

A fair bit of jQuery on the site, including the navigation and slider. We will be abandoning the drop-down navigation in the near future. Quite aside from its general unfriendliness to the increasing number of touchscreen devices, I'm just not happy with it.

Modules

Captcha
CGBlog
CGFeedback
CGFeedmaker
FormBuilder
Gallery
SiteMapMadeSimple
TemplateExternalizer

[neophron]

I'm wondering, nobody till now left any comments! Professional and clean, good color combination.
I would avoid the tables in the contact form.

We also have smarty logic in our Templates to make particular blocks only display if they have content.

Could you give an example?

Cheers

[Deak]

Hi neophron, thanks very much for your kind words. Yes, you're totally right; we should get rid of the tables on the contact forms. To be honest, I was a bit sloppy here and had some difficulty with the default tableless templates in FormBuilder. I should I really make my own!

Regarding the hiding of content blocks in a template if they do not contain content, something like this:

Code: Select all

{content block="Highlight Box" assign="highlight"}
{if !empty($highlight)}
<div class="highlight_box">
{content block="Highlight Box"}
<div class="clearfix"></div>
</div>
{/if}

Which means we can show or hide one of those purple banners depending on whether someone has added some text to it.

[neophron]

Hi Deak,

thank you for the information.

[Deak]

Hi Deak,

thank you for the information.

No problem. By the way, I posed a small update to the code example above which is much simpler (I think).

Cheers.

[nicmare]

very good job deak! one of the best CMSms sites here. im not kidding .

Features

One of our main goals for the site was to make each page look "designed", rather than something a content management system had spat out (i.e. with a single area where editable content appears causing pages to look very similar). To achieve this we have numerous content blocks on most pages and 5 page Templates. We also have smarty logic in our Templates to make particular blocks only display if they have content. There's a newsletter sign up, but this has a few kinks and will be removed. It's made using FormBuilder and will shortly be replaced with a Sentori sign-up form, which, obviously, we use for our own email marketing!

so when you want to add code to the then you have to change 5 templates?
and i dont see that much differences to all sites. sure, the homepage is unique but all other seems equal? left navigation and right content. am i missing something?

[Deak]

very good job deak! one of the best CMSms sites here. im not kidding .

Thanks, nicmare!

so when you want to add code to the then you have to change 5 templates?

I'm not seeing this as something we'd be doing often, most of the stuff we change in the is page-specific meta content (which is done at page level). I suppose if the number of templates became a problem, we could wrap things up in a Global Content Block? Assuming they work inside the , I've never tried. That would solve it, I think.

and i dont see that much differences to all sites. sure, the homepage is unique but all other seems equal? left navigation and right content. am i missing something?

That's a fair point, and you're mostly right. We're not yet where we want to be with all the pages (is a website ever really "finished"?), but if you compare the simple layout of this page to the Features or Reports pages you can see what I mean. The top and side navigations are constant, but we have variability in the content area. Having put the basic content into the site, it's now a secondary job to "design" the content; first, so that it looks nice and is easy to read; second, for SEO purposes.

Thanks again for the feedback.

[nicmare]

yea, designing the content of a CMS is pretty hard. i mean if the client want to edit it. how do you challenge that? seems the customer cant edit this because it will crash the layout? or is every page kind of "bulletproof" against "stupid" clients?

[Deak]

yea, designing the content of a CMS is pretty hard. i mean if the client want to edit it. how do you challenge that? seems the customer cant edit this because it will crash the layout? or is every page kind of "bulletproof" against "stupid" clients?

In this case, I'm the only editor for pages and CMSMS makes it very easy for me to maintain the content. My colleagues can contribute content to the blog, which, as you know, is much safer!

I don't think there's a perfect answer to complex layout vs. stupid clients. I've seen a few sites I've made destroyed by clients, even when I've removed most of the options from TinyMCE.

Was it Einstein who said something about underestimating the ingenuity of idiots?

[applejack]

Hi Deak. Nice looking site. How did you integrate Twiiter?

On the inner pages the content of the sub menu jumps slightly between the on and off states and the ones at the bottom when on show the off white state below the on state.

[nicmare]

what i dont like is the change from regular text to replaced text. its just a second but it appears every time on every page.

[Deak]

Hi Deak. Nice looking site. How did you integrate Twiiter?

Thanks! Twitter integration is pretty straight-forward. If you grab the JavaScript code from here:

http://www.sentori.co.uk/js/twitter.js

Then on your page just call:

Obviously just replace the user id in the json call with your own and set the count to be however many tweets you want shown.

On the inner pages the content of the sub menu jumps slightly between the on and off states and the ones at the bottom when on show the off white state below the on state.

I think there's a natural jump because the active state has more height (drop shadow etc), otherwise I'm not sure what you mean.

[Deak]

what i dont like is the change from regular text to replaced text. its just a second but it appears every time on every page.

That is a known issue in IE, I hoped adding a call to Cufon.now(); before the would have fixed it. It has, I believe on all pages except the homepage. I think the Twitter feed is doing something a little screwy with the loading of the homepage, hence the flicker.

[nicmare]

i am using FF 3.5.9 @ SN 10.6.3

[Deak]

i am using FF 3.5.9 @ SN 10.6.3

Fair enough, must be a different issue! I'm blaming the Twitter feed on the homepage!

If I get time/can be bothered, I may get the tweets to to load only once cufon has done its the text replacement. That should fix it, I think.