We’ve joined the Loudoun County Chamber of Commerce (northern Virginia / metro DC). We hope to get involved in some committees and start attending networking events. This seems like a great way to meet other local business owners and cross-pollenate, besides the obvious benefit of lead generation.

99designs.com is a crowd-sourcing method for generating web and graphic designs quickly. It is also fairly cost-effective.

99designs.com has some things going for it that are attractive to customers, but I’m a little concerned about how they have designers competing. I wonder what kind of pay the designers get, and where they’re based. My understanding is the designers don’t get paid unless their design won the “contest”. This is spec work, which undermines and devalues this industry in my opinion. Why work with a disgruntled designer or one that doesn’t respect him or herself?

For example, to post a project, a client would pay a flat fee of $39, which should ward off frivolous project requests, and the winner of the design contest would be awarded the project budget via escrow. The trouble I have with this is that the final budgets, while reasonable for one designer (if on the low end), do not pay the “losers” of the design contest. I think this is wrong. In essence, 99designs.com is a competitor to elance.com and odesk.com, but presents its projects as design “contests” when in fact it is a way for clients to procure designs without needing bids. It’s spec work. I don’t think anyone should work for free, even the ones that lose the contest.

While a client might get a bunch of design options for little money this way, this process cut out the whole discovery phase of the project. For example, as a client you might want a new header and logo for your site. You can request this and receive many responses, and there’s a good chance one of them will strike your fancy. Normally there would be at least a small phase of getting to know the customer, their needs, business model, etc. That is entirely missing in the 99designs.com model. It might work in the end, but it’s exploitative. In some cases, designers on there are even under 18 (reference).

It’s a freelance marketplace masquerading as design contests … for little or no pay, and using child labor.

building new company site in Drupal. Got mockups done, and functionality already in place. Joined the local Chamber of Commerce too.

waiting for Android 2 for Motorola Cliq XT for speech to text emailing

If your business has a physical location that customers can visit, consider getting listed in Google Local. It helps your site get valuable search engine traffic at no extra cost. I have even seen cases of businesses using this to replace their PPC campaign (AdWords).

Of course, there are businesses out there that will use fake addresses just so they can get listed. Google verifies by mail OR by phone … and these days it is possible to order a VOIP number for any location. One can only expect that Google will stop that practice at some point. Even if they don’t, having potential customers go to a non-existent address is not going to make them very happy!

Check out Google Local. It is an underutilized part of SEO.

Have you ever seen news articles that display the first letter in a very large font size? On web sites this is most often achieved using a graphic. That means keeping a library of graphics for all the letters in the alphabet, which I think makes editing a little cumbersome. Luckily, CSS3 offers us the ‘first-child’ pseudo-selector.

Example;

Lorem ipsum ei cetero legendos appellantur per, indoctum iudicabit ei duo, in per ignota persius perfecto. Duo ne alii summo consequuntur, vitae suscipit gloriatur cum ei, augue atomorum vulputate ea eum. Usu eu erant mediocrem, posse bonorum voluptatum et pro. Sea iisque gubergren rationibus cu, ne mea takimata mandamus laboramus. Duo utroque sententiae interesset te, luptatum scripserit suscipiantur et pri. Dicta verear appetere vim ne, nam eu alii ridens, aeque legendos ne mei.

HTML:

<p class=”firstparagraph”>Lorem ipsum ei cetero legendos appellantur per, indoctum iudicabit ei duo, in per ignota persius perfecto. Duo ne alii summo consequuntur, vitae suscipit gloriatur cum ei, augue atomorum vulputate ea eum. Usu eu erant mediocrem, posse bonorum voluptatum et pro. Sea iisque gubergren rationibus cu, ne mea takimata mandamus laboramus. Duo utroque sententiae interesset te, luptatum scripserit suscipiantur et pri. Dicta verear appetere vim ne, nam eu alii ridens, aeque legendos ne mei.</p>

CSS:

p.firstparagraph:first-letter{

Reference

Many of you will have received mailings from these people, which look more like a bill than a promotional mailing. They scare people into transferring their domains to them. They use some very deceptive practices, levy high fees, and are loath to issue refunds. It’s a scam. Avoid them.

Css’s first-child pseudo-selector is great!

Got an android phone!

While Joomla and Drupal are the leading open-source CMS systems in terms of adoption by developers, both still have room for improvement (and are indeed improving rapidly). In a nutshell, Joomla comes pre-installed with most everything you would expect to have on a site, and with a few extra addons you’re good to go. The Joomla 1.5 MVC architecture is powerful and the template coding is a clean and straightforward implementation of views in an MVC structure. On the other hand, Drupal is a framework that can be a blog, corporate site, social community, you name it. Out of the box it is not going to do very much for you; it requires customization, adding modules, etc. It offers much more fine-grained control over user permissions, event triggers, customizable views of content presentation (the “Views” module together with CCK), and .. dare I say it … an awful theming system. Consider it the price to pay for getting to use what is certainly a very powerful system.

In terms of interface usability (for the regular user, not us web developers), Drupal and Joomla both can be quite easy to use, but not out of the box. Drupal takes a bit more work to get user-friendly. Especially input formats need attention. The FCK editor with IMCE for file uploads is great, and the Wysiwyg module is probably the next big thing in Drupal editors – very nicely done.

WordPress beats both Joomla and Drupal in usability, hands-down, but customizing WordPress to make it function like a CMS is not as simple as one would like. It’s not WordPress’s fault: it’s a blogging platform.

OK, and now the reason for this post. Concrete5.

Concrete5 is yet another CMS built on PHP/MySQL, and claims to beat Joomla and Drupal, both in terms of usability and superior code. A big claim, for sure.  We tried it out on the Plethora Design development server and LOVED the ease of use when editing pages and customizing the look and feel of things. Joomla has some extensions that allow in-line editing, but not in-line template modification like this, except in very early alpha stages. Drupal is working on similar things but this is all still in alpha and beta, and months if not years way from being in core. So, one point for Conrete5.

Since it claims to be so easy to use, I tried to put myself in the shoes of one of our clients. I gace myself 10 minutes to figure it out, with using any tutorials or documentation, because if it is easy to use, tutorials and documentation should not be needed. So here’s what I did. I said to myself:

“I want to add a page. Oh, look, there’s an Add Page button”. Great.

“I need to edit this page. Aaah, an Edit Page button.” Cool.

What is especially wonderful is the ability to drag and drop page elements on the fly, and there is a nice context menu available when you click on an editable item.

Note that frontend editing is possible with both Joomla and Drupal but Concrete5 presents it in a (much) slicker way.

A very nice feature is the ability to edit the built-in image gallery.

Well, that covered most of the needs a small “brochure” site might need.

Last item;

“I need to add a contact form and also an application form with file uploads.”

I was not able to find a way to add a form. I know in Concrete5 forms are called “widgets” and you can also use external forms. Why is there no simple “Add Form” button like there is an “Add Page” button? I could find no way of doing this, even though the default installation (with sample data) does have an About page with a form embedded in it, and there is a Forms core block installed by default. I also know that file uploads are supported on forms. That’s all well and good, but now I want to add one, and I can’t. I spent about 10 minutes looking into this, checking their forum and documentation, and was none the wiser. I’m sure the answer is simple, but it should be obvious, especially for a CMS claiming such superiority. I may give it a whirl again at some other time, because it does look very well-suited to small sites … not for anything beyond that in my opinion (although I do realize it has a solid API and a dedicated developer community, so I could be taking this back in the future!).

Update:

See Tony’s comment below and this screencast on how to add a form in Concrete5. More videos for end users here.

Adding forms *is* very easy. The “Add to Main” link is not visible enough, but once you know where to look it’s not a problem. I think there ought to be an “add to main” icon floating to the left or right of the main content area, so one doesn’t need to scroll all the way down the page to find it. But the form editing here certainly blows Joomla and Drupal out of the water with its ease of use.

Conclusions

In terms of ease of use it is in the same league as hosted site builders such as Google Sites and Yahoo SiteBuilder (and that is not an insult!!), but with more control, and the ability for developers to extend the functionality. It’s as easy to use as WordPress, with the added bonus of being able to adjust the look and feel on the fly too. Overall it looks like a great CMS and is worth trying out. Why haven’t Joomla and Drupal added this kind of easy editing, after their many years and thousands of dedicated developers? It’s a bit baffling.