Let's talk quickly on timely topics to elevate your web strategy. Fellow developers will be addressed as well, but in small doses, and wherever possible, in common-speak.
Everyday we are challenged with presentation decisions. Do we stay cheap and seek admiration for our frugality and meager margins in a tough economy, or do we invest in standing out to bring superior value for our customers? While these decisions need not be zero-sum equations, our world-view regarding how we run the race in the new paradigm, as well as where we are running, will determine everything. Either you are committed to innovating your way to prominence, or you are seeking a comfortable place of security with minimal cost.
Here at CGIPro, we have wrestled mightily with the dillemma of accepting work we know falls below our vision of innovative excellence. We have catered to too many people who are comfortable racing to the bottom. A new day is dawning however. We are leaner, and ready for an exclusive clientele seeking innovative, interactive presentation as a key part of their race to the top.
We don’t have to be a highly expensive digital agency to achieve this. We just have to be properly committed to working with the right mindset.
If you want to race to the bottom, you can post your project on guru.com and find an Asian freelancer to work for $12/hr.
I have had a few inquiries lately on our experience with Wordpress. It is one of those things that we are called on to deal with extensively and creatively, but these kinds of projects rarely make it to our portfolio page.
For Wordpress integration, some of the more amazing things we have done in the last 2 years are:
1) I brought a fully pre-developed site design into a custom Wordpress theme, with all of it’s own session variables included, so the site has only one header/footer to edit. http://treatmentsolutionsnetwork.com
2) Combined a fully functional member management system, built on our CGI codebase framework, that I have been tuning for ten years, into a wordpress environment, building in custom plugins and privacy security.
(you wont be able to enjoy seeing the details of course.. it’s private.)
3) FourthSpeaker.com is my company blog for a prior startup I founded where I built an auto mailer to go out to various groups of recipients. Blog content is protected by the ‘levels’ plugin, and the bulk mailer sends some groups a weekly newsletter, and staff a daily update.
4) Created a Wordpress friendly Google Maps reservation system for a storage facility that needed to work fully within a designers wordpress theme. Although I had to use an iframe at the time, for this to work on budget in wordpress instead of a plugin, (which I would likely not do again), I was knee deep in wordpress to make this work properly.
New update here is that we just recently redid the CGIPro site to optimize it for a very wide range of browsers based on the viewport width.
Take a look at the rest of the site (the blog still has a few tweaks outstanding) in a pinched width and you will see the style automatically adjust to fit.
As a quick side project, I also just launched my wife’s female voice over talent website from the CGIPro template using the same tools. I even changed out the audio player based on the screen width so iPhone and Android users will just have a link to the MP3 files, which enjoy native support.
This really matters most for mobile. As an android phone user, I can tell you that most websites I see (which of course applies to the growing iPhone community as well) have a terrible formatting problem when viewing them on the phone. I can take your site as is and transform it to be optimal on all types of today’s continually diverging media.
