I’m working with a new client who is very impressed with bells and whistles. As a website designer, my primary mission is to design a website that not only differentiates my client from his competitors, but communicates his message as cleanly and succinctly as possible. However, I do appreciate a little eye candy.
Basically, he’s looking for a home page that (through animation or some other technology) will showcase some of his latest projects in a fun and interesting way. My understanding is that he’ll want to change the images and project descriptions on a fairly regular basis.
Although I love working with Freeway Pro, I’m thinking that a customized Joomla template might be the easiest and most practical solution for this particular job.
If you agree, what companies offer the best, most bug-free, Joomla templates? If you don’t agree, what other development platforms or actions do you recommend?
Perhaps I’m missing the obvious (I am tired) but I’m wondering what a Joomla template offers you in terms of eye candy/effects/animation etc. that you can’t do in FW with actions or additional markup? MODx is a slick piece of [CMS] kit but then again it has nothing to do with cool animations or effects. If your after effects then javascript is your friend: jQuery, MooTools, Scripty/Prototype etc., all of which can be integrated into FW.
Yeah, I’ve been looking at the Joomla stuff, and although it’s cool, you’re absolutely right. Not a lot of automatic animated effects, save image sliding and the likes.
To clarify, I’m looking for a simple way to add photos that fly in or out, or have some other automatic and cool transitional effect.
However, I have no desire to become a programmer, so whatever action or javascript plugin has to be fairly simple to implement.
However, I have no desire to become a programmer, so whatever action or javascript plugin has to be fairly simple to implement.
I use different tools these days so my familiarity with FW isn’t what it once was but I would guess Walter’s various Protaculous actions would be a good place to start looking.
Okay, now you’ve peaked my curiosity. What tools are you using and why the switch from FW?
I developed into one of those freak designers that actually likes working at code level. It’s about control and freedom; it’s just how I like to work. But in more practical real-world terms the type of commercial work I’m pursuing requires code literacy and in many cases WYSIWYG tools like FW are not not taken seriously nor do they have the features to work effectively in structured team environments.
It is easy enough to add the ‘bells and whistles’ that you want through the script/protaculous actions but what is not so easy is to have these updatable by the client - if that is what you want to achieve.
It can be done - and I think that some of the guys have used WebYep to do it - but first I think that you have to decide what it is you want.
There was some discussion some time ago about having a client updatable Carousel but I dont think that was a goer.
This is can be edited and updated by the client through a web interface. It is a standalone script.
But if you dont need your client to be able to do this - if you have that job - then it is straightforward to have any number of effects on your pages.
the topic itself is that interesting and brought us to think about that general rumors "CMS and “BlingBling” or Content Advanced.
We then started a project that:
Is based on Freeway’s sensational Framework
Inserted the “editable areas” as webyep elements.
So far so good - the (not finished) result is
http://http://q-ring.de/index.php .It’s a raw actually but just for example: The index slideshow is hype (iFramed) but we also add wow sliders in the past. The wy elements are all coming with a full-featured rich-text editor (tinyMCE) including file/image upload facility.
None of the content is add by Freeway - all is webyep.
The pain?
You’d leave the Freeway area at a point and deal with external stuff to polish everything (as meant above CSSEdit and BBEdit) - but it’s part of my personal learning curve:
Proper Framework in Freeway through BoxModel
Learn and understand the roundabout HTML/CSS
Dynamics like Java/JQuery
Open End
But one thing I’ll try to keep always in mind:
All this never happened without Freeway/Softpress/Freewaytalk and all the great people here ever spent a value and helping word.