Archive for January, 2006

01.11.06

Let One Thousand Flowers Bloom

Posted in General Ramblings at 4:44 pm by kkj

The Corporate Website: That digital worldwide extension of business on the ubiquitous Internet, carved in bits and painted in company colors. Any respectable organization has one, sporting at the minimum information about mission, strategy, services, and contact information.

My company has had such a site for some time now, a long time in fact with no-one making any updates, and this is a common trap: To create a website from static HTML with the good intentions of updating it every so often. The problem is either that there is no news (no easy technological fix there) or that it is too cumbersome to go and add new content. The solution? Use a content management system (CMS) behind the site and tailor a minimal set of templates for the editor’s use.

Charged with the daunting task of giving the site a serious facelift, I set out to look for a cheap - as in free - CMS system which was written in Java so I could use my hard earned skills in that language. The CMS had to have a nice administrative interface with user and role management. It should be really easy to create new editors and really simple for those editors to go and edit content. At the same time I wanted flexibility. The layout and look of the site should be completely configurable, and it should not require a set of rocket scientists to figure out how. It turns out there is literally thousands of content management systems out there, open source and commercial. How do they all survive?

Anyway, after scouring, sorting, browsing, googling and using my hitherto undiscovered sleuthing abilities to their full extent, I finally found what I was looking for. I went on to hire a web designer to come up with a new look and make a few HTML based templates, then turned them into JSP files that could be used by the CMS as page templates. Finally I spent some time learning the basics of the tool and filled in content and pictures. The result can be seen at the official online corporate website of Silverbullet.

Let one thousand flowers bloom … mine is a Magnolia