Monday, October 25th, 2010

Six Laws of CMS: lessons from a web site launch

As regular visitors may be aware, I spend a lot of time with web content management systems (CMS). Having spent some time involved in a biggish web site relaunch this year, I can now reliably draft some of the Laws of CMS that anyone in this field should expect to apply. Law 1: It only exists […]

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

Which CMS? Drupal vs Expression Engine – a diary of frustration

I’ve been posting a bit about dithering between WordPress and Drupal for a web development project, and also which one to use for a student learning environment. Fellow blogger Soilman is in a similar position – though he’s dithering between Drupal and Expression Engine for bigger, corporate sites. Here’s how he compares the two: Drupal […]

Friday, June 19th, 2009

Do we overestimate journalism students' web skills?

From the Twitter feed:  do journ educators misunderstand level of students’ web skills?advanced online journalism module set up at Sunderland-only 4 signed up From my observations – yes, I think we do. As I’ve noted before, journalism (and other) students live their lives on Facebook, but when it comes to actually using the web more, […]

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

Great beginner's guide to CSS

I’ve just come across this simple start-up tutorial to cascading style sheets (CSS), which is ideal for the absolute beginner. Much like style sheets in QuarkXPress and InDesign, CSS is at the heart of the look-and-feel of content management systems (CMS). But unlike style sheets in QuarkXPress and InDesign, CSS code looks like, well, code. […]

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

Navigating the CMS minefield

Regular, geeky readers of Freelance Unbound will know that I am striving hard to become literate in the ways of CMS – that is in actually constructing a CMS-based site, not just using one. This stuff is pretty hard to get to grips with for a non-techie journalist, so I’ve been trawling the web for […]