Perhaps the most important aspect in the development of a website is content, and is something I stress to clients when planning their projects. And I know from personal experience how difficult it can be to take time otherwise spent in revenue-generating activities to devote to populating the site with useful and illuminating information.
Eliminating the hassle from site development
The content mangement system
An important consideration when re-designing the site was to enable me to add pages of content quickly, and to organise it so that the site was easy to maintain wherever I happen to be. To do this I have updated and improved the bespoke Web Content Management System (WCMS) developed for my clients.
While all of the really clever stuff is hidden away from visitors to the site, once logged into the WCMS I am able to upload images and documents, crop and resize photos, and edit content with a 'Word' style rich text editor, all via a web browser.
Integrated security and mailing system
Having created the ability for users to securely register and log into the site, certain areas or pages of the site can be secured for viewing by only certain groups or individual members.
Registered users are subscribed to available mailing lists, currently for News and Articles, with the ability to unsubscribe and manage their account through the site. The generation of e-mail content and delivery is also via the website. This allows me to quickly prepare and send clients and visitors updates as they are added to the site.
Coming Soon Plans are already developed to incorporate data from my project management system and make reports and financial statements available to registered clients.
Device-dependent responsive and touch enabled framework
The bulk of my efforts with re-design has been to incorporate the latest techniques for displaying the site on portable and small-screen devices. This means that visitors get an optimised viewing and navigation experience on whatever device they happen to be using, with the benefit to me, as the developer, that I need only create one version of the website for all modern platforms.
Having developed several sites already based on the open-source framework developed by Zurb, I've further developed functionality and presentation style for use in this site.
The design
I'll leave it up to you to decide whether you like the design. Please let me know what you think - send me a message as I'd appreciate the feedback!