New Site - Critique Welcome

Freeway
1

I have just uploaded a new site which combines Freeway for all of the structure, Perch CMS for the site content and FoxyCart for the shop.

Any critique is gratefully received.

http://www.scrummypressies.co.uk

Thanks

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2

Hi BigG,

Looks lovely and friendly, perfect for the products. Wish I had more designer skills.

The font for the navigation and some body text is perhaps a bit ‘boring’ given the nature of the site, rollovers are a bit pale (pink).

Try your ‘search our site’; ie. bags. The site goes a bit skew whiff. Click on one of the search results, even more skew whiff.

Interested in your use of Perch, I’m looking to use it - how does it score over the lovely leanness of Pulse ?

s

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3

Thanks.

What do you mean by skew whiff? I am having an issue with the logo and navigation overlapping in IE on certain pages where Perch is used, but it’s correct in safari and ff on my mac.

Can you do a screen grab of where you think the error is and ping it to me

nathan.garner (at) rla.co.uk

Thanks mate

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4

Can you do a screen grab of where you think the error is and ping it to me

Have done.

s

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5

Thanks George

I have now corrected the errors and made the rollovers white which should help usability.

I will look at the other fonts styles to help lift the overall feel.

Thanks for your help.

Nathan

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6

I haven’t really tried Pulse, but with regards to Perch, I like it because it installs all the php files onto the clients server (after purchasing a licence), and then you can edit templates, css etc. to your hearts content.

There are some basic templates for content regions, twitter feeds, blog, events diary, pages-on-the-fly and shop, which, once you get your head around them (doesn’t take long), are pretty easy to edit and style the way you want them.

I’m not way near an expert, and have only just scraped the surface of what’s possible, but the support is excellent from Rachel and Drew.

This site has a showcase of sites powered by perch:
http://www.poweredbyperch.com/

Nathan

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7

Hi Nathan,

Glad I could help.

Shall give Perch a go I think, probably just as easy as pulse, once familiar with the way it works.

george aka s

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8

Looks good but the white rollovers dont work for me.

There are also some missing pics in the Jewellery section ie Green Fimo Clay and Ceramic Bead Bracelet for 2

David

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9

Hmmm

Ah, I only changed the ‘white’ rollover with in the navigation. Will do it throughout.

I have just been on and those images are there - maybe something screwy with the db… I will keep it monitored.

Thanks

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10

Interested in your use of Perch, I’m looking to use it - how does it score over the lovely leanness of Pulse ?

It offers more granular control of things, though not to the extent of something like MODx or Joomla etc. It’s lightweight but deceptively powerful also if you know how to get the most out of it.

The thing you need to remember is that depending on what you’re trying to accomplish with your templates you will need to delve into writing some code to tell Perch what to do, and the more complex your goal the higher you need to roll up your sleeves. Nathan is correct that the basics are easy to grasp but it’s also not a point-n-click CMS. Here’s a great cheat sheet http://quick.grabaperch.com/ explaining the lingo/functions. If stuff like this makes you twitchy then you may not like working with templates.

Todd

Sent from my iVey

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11

Hi Nathan,

You should look the site over with the W3C Markup Validator…
http://validator.w3.org/ …it will tell you that you have several missing
anchor end-tags, and some of your divs are wrapped in paragraph tags.
There may be more stuff, but that stands out readily.

The p-wrapped divs are a result of how Freeway Pro currently handles
“empty” html boxes. If all you’re dropping into an html box is markup
stuff, it’s good idea to hit the box with the Remove Paragraph Tags
action by Tim Plumb http://www.freewayactions.com/product.php?id=beta

Looks like lots of long, careful work. Nicely done!

–
Ernie Simpson

On Tue, May 8, 2012 at 4:25 AM, BigG email@hidden wrote:

I have just uploaded a new site which combines Freeway for all of the
structure, Perch CMS for the site content and FoxyCart for the shop.

Any critique is gratefully received.

http://www.scrummypressies.co.uk

Thanks

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12

Or, use the CrowBar Action instead of a Markup Item to place your template code. I’m working on a Perch site right now that uses this latter technique.

Walter

On May 8, 2012, at 10:59 AM, Ernie Simpson wrote:

The p-wrapped divs are a result of how Freeway Pro currently handles
“empty” html boxes. If all you’re dropping into an html box is markup
stuff, it’s good idea to hit the box with the Remove Paragraph Tags
action by Tim Plumb http://www.freewayactions.com/product.php?id=beta

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13

Nice one Ernie - I will go over the site to clean it up.

And thanks Walter too.

These and more comments are really helpful thanks again.

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14

It offers more granular control of things, though not to the extent of something like MODx or Joomla etc. It’s lightweight but deceptively powerful also if you know how to get the most out of it.

Thanks Todd, that’s useful to know, especially the link.

I’ve poured over the Perch site and through being comprehensive they’ve made it more complicated sounding. Their use of the word ‘template’ (and apps) I think misleading and confusing, to me at least. Embedded code is perhaps more apt.

Appreciate Perch can potentially do more than Pulse, hence being interested but generally speaking all that’s required is; text areas with inline imagery* (perch requires tweaking on the latter), a blog/news element, Events could be useful, and…, etc… Search, forms etc. can be done via freeway or another.

  • I’ve looked at several cms and amazed at how many fall at this ‘basic’ aspect.

Anyway, onward,

S

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15

Hey Walter - does Crowbar also deal with the empty div paragraph-tag
problem? I must confess that I am still getting caught up on the latest
workarounds.

–
Ernie Simpson

On Tue, May 8, 2012 at 11:04 AM, Walter Lee Davis email@hiddenwrote:

Or, use the CrowBar Action instead of a Markup Item to place your template
code. I’m working on a Perch site right now that uses this latter technique.

Walter

On May 8, 2012, at 10:59 AM, Ernie Simpson wrote:

The p-wrapped divs are a result of how Freeway Pro currently handles
“empty” html boxes. If all you’re dropping into an html box is markup
stuff, it’s good idea to hit the box with the Remove Paragraph Tags
action by Tim Plumb http://www.freewayactions.com/product.php?id=beta

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16

I’ve used most of the apps, both the default set and the ones that can be added and the real standouts for me have been “Forms” (cool features and useful options with minimal tweaking), “Events” (really useful and easy to modify) and of course the “Blog”. Those 3 alone have been indispensable.

It’s really worth the time to investigate and for your needs you could probably get away with the default set of templates secure in the knowledge that you have a lot of room to do more complex things if/when the time arises and as your comfort level increases.

Todd

I’ve poured over the Perch site and through being comprehensive they’ve made it more complicated sounding. Their use of the word ‘template’ (and apps) I think misleading and confusing, to me at least. Embedded code is perhaps more apt.

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17

Its a very pretty website! I love it. Agreed with about white rollovers though… go darker pink perhaps.

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18

Agreed. the Rollovers are getting changed. Thank you, and thanks for the comments.

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19

Yes. It extends the Markup Item behavior in the following ways:

  1. If you put it at the beginning or end of a paragraph of text, the code inside it will be moved outside of the enclosing tag, so your code would look like this: [your code here]<p>The text that came after it… or …the text that came before it.</p>[your code here].

  2. If you put it inline within a block of text, it acts just like a normal Markup Item. No win there.

  3. If you put it all alone on a line of text, it completely removes any enclosing tags, so if you had several paragraphs of text, you could remove one entirely.

    In Freeway:

    Some text

    [CrowBar]

    Some more text

    Becomes:

    Some text

    [your code here]

    Some more text

Walter

On May 8, 2012, at 12:38 PM, Ernie Simpson wrote:

Hey Walter - does Crowbar also deal with the empty div paragraph-tag
problem? I must confess that I am still getting caught up on the latest
workarounds.

–
Ernie Simpson

On Tue, May 8, 2012 at 11:04 AM, Walter Lee Davis email@hiddenwrote:

Or, use the CrowBar Action instead of a Markup Item to place your template
code. I’m working on a Perch site right now that uses this latter technique.

Walter

On May 8, 2012, at 10:59 AM, Ernie Simpson wrote:

The p-wrapped divs are a result of how Freeway Pro currently handles
“empty” html boxes. If all you’re dropping into an html box is markup
stuff, it’s good idea to hit the box with the Remove Paragraph Tags
action by Tim Plumb http://www.freewayactions.com/product.php?id=beta

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20

Yep got it thanks!!

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