Iv’e been a maker of websites for a very long time now - as long as you can in this industry almost. I lived and worked in both Brighton and London, and for the past ten years Ive been based in Dorset - quite a lot of that time freelancing for London based companies.
Whats critical in my opinion about making websites - from the point of view of the builder is that there is the flexibility to encompass the most common technical needs with the most common design needs. Thats why Grav interests me, it promises a bit of everything, and in just the right quantity.
This concept frustratingly seems to directly counter my experience in Dorset where there are two flavours of agencies involved in making websites. Im picking on Dorset as it illustrates a point. One set are shifting from traditional design and make Wordpress sites predominantly because they can advertise for people to do that, its a nice closed loop, they don’t want to pay for a broadly skilled developer or work with someone to build them up - consequently the websites look pretty, but don’t work very well, because Wordpress is awful. The other type is the company thats really good at developing stuff, but when it comes to design they are all at sea. They might pay a designer to come in and consult but ultimately because there is no design culture there, the designer becomes second fiddle. There are a few breaking the mould, but they are few and far between.
Ok - I admit this site currently doesn’t have many design merits. But thats the point of this blog, its a steep learning curve. This stuff is quite new. Hopefully soon I will be able to bend the display a bit more to will.
So, the basic checklist of requirements is,
So you might be thinking why not use one of the very good bits of software already available? Well - up until recently I don’t think there have been. Back in the day - Wordpress was a really capable bit of kit. Now its a wheezing pensioner. All kinds of security issues which necessitate constant upgrades. This means your themes have to be rock solid inline with the code. As with Microsoft, its a victim of its own success. Hackers target Wordpress sites because they know its a fishing expedition and those sites offer the best chance of success. Other platforms just haven't been accepted in the same kind of way - Drupal, Joomla and so on. Maybe in the states, but not here in the UK. Its all been about Wordpress unless you are big enough to use something like Oracle.
Then you have the really well invested software / sites like Squarespace. Im a big fan of Squarespace. You really do get a lot for your money. I used it extensively to make a fairly decent sized site a few years ago - for speed mainly as it was a commercially cheap service, and compared to developing a website is much, much quicker. But it suffers from one major problem. They have spent so much time making the front end a super GUI, there is almost no space for anyone reasonably competent at coding to ad value. You can download the entire software and alter it - but as you can imagine they don’t publish how-tos, so its pretty difficult. At the next level you have platforms like Magneto - its a big learning curve, its all DB based. They service lots of plugins and can make cutom arrangements, but its super expensive.
At the other end you have frameworks for PHP / various other languages that allow you to build your own sites. These are amazing - Ive used one myself, but there is a massive learning curve involved and stuff thats reinventing the wheel because you for example repetitively use things like image library and login screen. If you wanted to build a one off site that was completely bespoke great.
OK, so what are the advantages of building a site with a flat file CMS like Grav?
Well ease of use is a big one. Yes, one-button Wordpress install, but - biggest Wordpress issue is mySQL database and permissions. None of that with Grav, and flat file CMS - hooray! If you’ve ever had to negotiate that stuff, its OK if it works but when it breaks…mySQL and mymPHPadmin - oh god. Life is too short. Installing can be done via command line or just dragging a zip into the site folder. My host gives you an unzipping function - Im not so good with command line.
Speed is another - generally because there is no query to a database the whole thing is a lot, lot faster.
Adding custom css is another - its dead easy. You can make a theme, but if you’re in a hurry and just need basic functionality, making design changes are easy.
After that, the similarity to Wordpress and others like it is fairly similar. There is a lot of templates that run everything and site files are generally sat inside a /user folder and templates in a /templates folder.
The learning curve is fair I’d say - making a basic site is simple. But as soon as you want to start repurposing content - like individual blog posts say - its a bit more learning. I will cover the easy stuff from a designers point of view in a later post.