CMS Made Simple Forums

Hello All

My company Webber Design www.webber-design.com (built with cmsms) have been using CMSMS for all our sites for a year and a half now and we're finally getting around to showing some of them off to the CMSMS community. Our experience with CMSMS has been fantastic - such an easy way to get a good site built, and when there is finally true multi-lang support it will be even better. Webber Design would like to thank all the developers and contributors for making our working lives that much easier. A few years ago we were building bespoke content management systems for clients at great cost... that's all over now.

Here's a selection of the Sites:
1) Newpart - an arts/events site for Newport in South Wales: http://www.newpart.co.uk
2) Fishermen's Mission - charity site for UK fishing industry: http://www.fishermensmission.org.uk
3) Ttotal - a Fine quality UK Tea company (best cuppa we've ever tasted!): http://www.ttotal.co.uk
4) Urbancircle - a site for an Urban online radio station: http://www.urbancircle.co.uk
5) Franchise News 24 - the world's first 24hr franchise news online TV channel: http://www.franchisenews24.co.uk
6) VIP Film Productions - film production company site: http://www.vipfilmproductions.com
7) Autografik Design - site for a print design company: http://www.autografikdesign.com

There's loads more where those came from (about 20 sites in total)... all validated (xHtml and CSS) smoothly... except for the pages with Google Maps (struggling a bit there - any suggestions).

Thanks for looking and keep up the sterling work you CMSMS developers out there. Any comments gratefully accepted.
Diolch yn fawr,
Rhys webber

nice! someone has been busy

Its great that those layouts dont look at all like cmsms

How did you create the shopping cart on http://www.ttotal.co.uk/?  Did you use a module for that or is that custom work.  All of the sites look very nice.  Good Work!!!

Very  nice indeed. One quick thing I saw, on the fisherman site. Wile clicking the "text only site", there are "literal" tags shown on top.

Ronny

hey bbonora

the shopping cart on the ttotal site is a 3rd party product called shop director http://www.polyspaston.com/content_home.php which we just had to integrate into the cmsms site . Thanks for the comments.

hey Ronny - thanks for the comments and the heads-up on the fishermens mission  - it has been fixed now.

hey tsw - thanks, we try not to be constricted by the software and cmsms is so flexible that we don't have to be!

Wow Rhys I may have to kidnap you sometime to utilise your design expertise. 

The sites are very very nice and even xhtml compliant in most instances.  You are either paid a lot or have too much spare time.... 

Excellent examples and an inspiration to basic CMSMS users like myself and lastly thanks for sharing them with us all here.

Hello Rhys, Great sites and designs. Please , I would like to know how you got to do this. Did you use page blocks? Did you design with global_blocks(html_blobs)? Can One actually design the whole site with html_blobs? Any info would be appreciated. tHANKS

Hello Chuky
Our process is as follows:
1) Design the page in pshop/fireworks/illustrator (as appropriate to the style). Get it signed off by client.
2)Build a xHtml version of the page in Dreamweaver so that we can get the CSS styling done quickly offline - we don't do table based design at all - all CSS2.
3) When the page looks right in Dreamweaver, we take the xHTML, make it a template in CMSMS and integrate all the required smarty tags {content} {stylesheet} etc. We use between 1 and 8 content blocks generally.
4) Take the CSS from Dreamweaver and make it a CMSMS stylesheet, then wire it up to the template.
5) Tweak the template and CSS as required for perfect layout.

Most of the sites have more than one template for diversity in the layouts.

We do use Global Content Blocks extensively (previously blobs) , as well as the random image function for constantly changing sites (eg make 10 pics and get the random function to choose 1 on page load).

Most of the hard work is in getting the CSS layout right (especially across all browsers), but we've done so many now that it has become easy and quick. If you are using tables for layout, ditch them - spend some time learning css positioning and you'll never go back...

Feel free to post any other q's - hope this helped,
rhys

Thanks a lot rhys, this is quite insightfull. It will go far in pointing me in the right direction. Am sure I will be asking more questions as time goes on. I must say that am so amazed at the kind of sites that people are creating with cmsms. I joined this community a long while ago but I went and believed the hype(  Joomla/drupal) and abandoned my learning of this CMSMS. I would have become one of the cmcms experts/gurus if I had stayed on and not been distracted by what I read about the other two .

From what I see and even what I experienced when I first tried CMSMS, this is by far the easiest and best CMS to create Corporate business , as well as personal sites.