Warthog gets a Makeover
Warthog has been around since 1997 and is in its 5th reincarnation. This however is still about 8 years old - light years in terms of the Internet. CSS had just arrived and all the tricks that browsers recognized were employed. The stylesheet is monstrous and around 40kb. I did tweak it a few years ago but a some weeks ago, a prospect noted that the site looked ‘old’ - which it does - and provided the necessary spark to tackle a revamp.
The first site was wonderful - all the techniques that are big NoNos today. There was a splash page with a leather background tile. In the middle was a punk warthog with Mohican orange hair, an earring and, even worse, an eye that winked showing a little heart on the eyelid.
The new site will employ new techniques but the emphasis will be on improving the content. I’m still not happy with it after all these years. Should be about a week until it appears.
ModX
About a year ago, I did a site for Ace Ministries. A Joomla site. I was not thrilled about it, or about Joomla. It was my first Joomla site and took a while to cobble together. The client took almost two years to finish it off and in the meantime I had done a much larger Joomla site for Civicus. The last Joomla site was for the local History Museum and I got really frustrated with its size and slow speed - particularly in the development.
The fellow Ace have temporarily looking after the site has managed to delete all the Components. I suggested to them that they do a reinstall and repopulate the pages to clean all the shrapnel from the CMS. They’re not keen and will probably fiddle their way through it. However, as an exercise I converted the site’s 50 pages to ModX as an exact replica of the Joomla site. It took three hours - mostly reformatting the content - and I was quite impressed. Replicating the whole look & feel and getting the accordion navigation right took less than an hour.
Its up at http://search-optimizers.co.za/ace/.