David Behan's Web Design Ireland Blog

Cigars.ie - Screenshot

Cigars.ie is a little side venture I have going with my cousin, Mark and brother-in-law, Yiorgos. Both Mark and Yiorgos are big time cigar enthusiasts, so last year we set up a blog on cigars.ie, concentrating on cigar news and reviews. Content started to follow, traffic trickled in, and comments began appearing… so we decided it needed a facelift. Last night we launched the new look cigars.ie and we also now have a twitter account that people can follow us on.

If you have any feedback on the site or suggestions for future developments, we’d love to hear them.

Made In Hollywood

Our blog has been pretty quiet over the past couple of months and that’s because it’s been extremely busy here (I’m happy to say) working on existing projects going live before Christmas and with new clients preparing for their projects in the new year. One of the projects we’ve been working on is for Fran Hollywood of Made In Hollywood. I have to say, it’s been a pleasure working with Fran on this website and we really have done a lot with Fran to help him with his online presence. We’re looking forward to working on a few marketing campaigns with Fran in the new year too.

The best way to explain what Made In Hollywood do is to show you, so I advise you check out their Marketing Portfolio or their Architecture Portfolio. They specialise in polystyrene foam and cutting it into any shape you want so they can make lots of versatile results for architects as well as generate over sized marketing props that stand out.

I’d like to wish Fran the very best with the new site but you’ll hear more from them come the new year as we’ve a few things planned. Oh, if you want, you can follow the guys on twitter too.

Penina Apartments

We’ve been working hard on a new site for an apartment complex in the Algarve, Portugal that has had a great appeal to me personally. As many of my friends, work colleagues and clients know – I’m a golf fanatic! I’ll play as often as I can, weather permitting and I’m constantly trying to get my handicap down.

What makes Penina Apartments different is that they have a special golfing offer available to anyone who stays with them. Up to 6 people can stay in each apartment and of those, up to 4 residents can enjoy a free daily round of golf at the Henry Cotton designed Penina Championship Golf Course. Prices vary between each apartment and the week you book but taking one of the weeks in November, a 3 bedroom apartment can work out at GBP 700 (approx. EUR 860). Dividing that in to 4 golfers, it works out at €215 per person for their accommodation and their golf for the week. As many golfers will recognise, that’s a great offer.

I welcome my readers to check out the website and see what you think. If any of you are interested in a round of golf sometime, do give me a shout or leave a comment – I’m always up for a game.

Google Chrome

Google have just launched a new browser called Google Chrome. It’s aim is to be a faster, simplier and safer browser than what is currently available. Reading about speed tests of the new browser, it seems to be very impressive. I’ve already downloaded it and given it a whirl and I’m quite impressed myself with it’s speed. Flicking through Gmail on FireFox can take a couple of seconds but it flies along in Chrome.

Address Bar

They’ve added some neat features too, like Incognito Mode, where everything you do in this mode is done privately and won’t appear in your web history. I also like the way they highlight the domain you are currently on in the address bar. I’m guessing this to help with phishing websites – a simple but nice feature. They’ve also included crash control so if a web page causes a crash, it will only crash the current tab as all tabs are kept independent of each other. I also like their new tab window that shows most visited sites with thumbnails and a history search box. A bit like the speed dial on Opera but nice all the same.

I quickly ran the Acid2 test to see how compliant it is with web standards and it passed with smiley faces (FF3 also passes but IE7 fails miserably). As long as this does not become a headache to test in, I’m all for it. I’ve tried a few sites I’ve designed and all looks ok and they load exceptionally fast. When I first saw the browser, I thought… oh great, another browser to test in. But so far, it’s been a good experience so maybe not too much to worry about after all.

Well, there’s a quick review and I suggest you give it a try. What do you think of it? Will you give up FireFox or run it parallel?

Well, it’s that time of year again… awards season for the Irish web industry. This year sees a new awards being launched, making it 3 awards ceremonies for us webbies to go to.

Irish Web Awards 2008

Irish Web Awards 2008 – October 11th
The Irish Web Awards is the new awards to launch this year. Following the success of the Irish Blog Awards over the past couple of years, Damien Mulley has launched the Irish Web Awards 2008. Categories for the awards include News & Media, Entertainment, Technology, Government &Community, Education & Science, Commerce, Speciality, Technical Awards and an overall Grand Prix. There’s something for everyone in there. Damien is promoting full transparency with these awards and has released the scorecard that will be used to judge nominations. Also, sponsors of the awards cannot have a nomination. These awards will be a bit more casual (as you won’t need a penguin suit) but Damien promises it will be more fun. If the Blog Awards are anything to go by, I’d well believe it. Very nice logo I might add… by Spoilt Child I do believe.

IIA Net Visionary

IIA Net Visionary – October 30th
The Net Visionaries are run by the Irish Internet Association, and according to the IIA, are unique in that they are run and voted on by the Irish web industry. They may not be unique anymore with the launch of the Irish Web Awards this year. A large range of categories are available to get nominated in, including Best Business Blogger, Innovation Award, Internet Entrepreneur, Internet Marketer, Student Project Award, Web Designer Excellence, and Web Developer Excellence. There is something new with these awards this year in that if you (or someone from your company) have won an award in a particular category over the past 2 years, you cannot be nominated in that category. Not a bad idea to allow a rotation of winners. The awards night is a black tie affair and having attended these events a couple of years ago, I must say, it’s a great night.

Golden Spiders

Golden Spider Awards – November 20th
The Golden Spiders are run by Business & Finance magazine and always raise debate about the validity of the awards. So far I haven’t seen anything this year but I’m sure it’s on it’s way! Regardless, I stick to the opinion that the Golden Spiders are a business awards and it is seen as this. We’ve won a Golden Spider award twice in the past for clients and it really does help our business and our clients in promoting their website. The difference with Golden Spider Awards and the other 2 above is that they charge for you to enter and you might not get short listed. The cost of entry is €150. There’s a whole host of categories ranging the business community from finance to professional services, property to recruitment, and many more. There’s a new award this year for Young Designer of the Year. It’ll be interesting to see who gets nominated for and wins this one. This year, the Golden Spiders have published their judging criteria on the website and have added additional information about web standards. The Spiders are a black tie affair as well and having attended the past 2 years, I found it to be a great night for networking with a lot of the larger companies in the web industry. I’ve made a number of contacts from these nights.

Well, I’ll hopefully be putting a couple of sites forward to each of the awards this year and in turn, I should be attending each of them. Hopefully I’ll see you there.

I was reading a post this morning about CMS vs Frameworks and it got me thinking about how I like to work on projects. I think there are some great CMS’s (content management systems) out there to allow you to manage content on your website, including WordPress that I’m using to write this blog post (you may have noticed that I’m writing a lot more in the last week since I upgraded to the latest version). They come with some great features and are really great to use for me and for my clients. What this article highlighted for me is two things… there is usually a learning curve around a new CMS in terms of setting them up, tweaking them, customising them to way you want, etc. and also that you often loose a lot of control over the output because you are using the accompanied frontend code.

For me as a designer and developer, I like to have a lot of control of the pages that appear on the frontend but I often need to include CMS functionality for my clients so they can update the content on an ongoing basis. So, what do you do… do it all with a custom build, e.g. custom database, custom cms, custom frontend development? Or use an off-the-shelf CMS that you can build the site around and include sections that you need? I’ve done both of these a number of times over the past few years and which one really depends on budget and timeframe.

We have our own Property Manager CMS (see www.gorhomes.ie for a sample) for our property company clients that we’ve built and maintained for the past few years. This was a custom build but we try and keep costs down by specialising in this market. On the other hand, I’ve used the likes of ExpressionEngine to build a couple of CMS driven sites (see www.trimgaa.ie for an example). Both options have their pros and cons, such as:

Custom CMS Build

• Pros – Complete control, works the way you want
• Cons – Costly to develop and maintain, takes longer to develop

Off-The-Shelf CMS

• Pros – Code updating managed for you, quicker to deploy, cost effective
• Cons – Less control over outputted code, learning curve (e.g. EE tags in Expression Engine), frustration with new development procedures (e.g. editing css/xhtml in a browser instead of in your favourite development programme)

So, what I’ve done a few times now is try a hybrid solution and I think I want to do it more in the future. Instead of using a full off-the-shelf product for the CMS and the frontend, I’ve tried using the CMS and database only, and then integrate a custom frontend website/application into that database. This way, i feel you’re getting the best of both worlds: a CMS that is quick and low cost to deploy and maintain while still taking full control over the frontend with custom hand written code.

An example of a fantastic CMS application that I’ve used in this hybrid fashion is SlideShowPro Director. I’ve used SlideShowPro a number of times on sites and it’s a great way of showing a gallery of photos or a portfolio but these days, I’m tending to stay away from flash if I can, and use javascript instead. Therefore, I don’t want to use the SlideShowPro frontend flash output but I do love the CMS that Director is. So, I’ve been able to use SlideShowDirector as a backend CMS to manage a portfolio and at the same time, custom write a frontend javascript based gallery to work directly with the database and it works the way I want it. I didn’t need to extend the CMS in any way, just see how it worked in relation to the database and away I went. I’m thinking of trying something similar with the new ExpressionEngine when it comes out as I love the way you can build custom sections in the database from within the CMS.

So, what do you think? Do you lock yourself into a particular CMS and feel confined? Or do you custom build every CMS and find you’ve never any time? Or are you looking at this Hybrid CMS Solution and if so, can you tell me any other ones you’ve used or would recommend?