arthuc01

I like the design -very nice
You may want to make it clear on the front page what the site is for – i had to go to the about page and even then i was a bit confused…
A 7.4Mb Mp3 is quite big to expect folk to download – (i wasn’t even going to try over my wee dialup) – I have used
https://mp3soundstream.com/
in the past which converts Mp3 to a streaming Flash audio file – which is very handy and allows quite good play back – alternately you could do a small 30sec clip MP3 or wavas a ‘taster’

Essentially what your talking about is doing
h1 WAR! /h1
h2 Germany invades Poland /h2
h3 Europe is quite distressed on the matter /h3
h4 Americans worried about cheese supply /h4
Which isn’t an easy thing to do in any CMS without having 4 invidual header categories in the database that powers it . everything else is fairly straight forward with the above scripts.
I was starting to think that you could do it by putting in the title field
“h1 WAR! /h1 h2 Germany invades Poland /h2 h3 Europe is quite distressed on the matter /h3 h4 Americans worried about cheese supply /h4” (With relevent < of course )
– but most CMS’s will convert the < and /> into ascii character codes.
If I were you I would use Mambo (which has good control over frontpage article listing (i.e you can have ‘headlines’ which aren’t really possible with Textpattern or WP)) and then use the excerpt section to add your second tier headlines eg
TITLE : WAR (rendered as h1 automatically by your template)
EXCERPT
h2 Germany invades Poland /h2
h3 Europe is quite distressed on the matter /h3
h4 Americans worried about cheese supply /h4
MAIN BODY
…..well the text.
Its not ideal …. but you do have a very odd layout…

I use WP with a number of news and information sites – and combine it with MiniBB and DWODP for extra functionality. But to be honest although i love wp its not ideal at the moment and as david says hopefully more of the plugins and hacks will help make it easier to turn WP into a fully fledged CMS. In the meantime heres a few of my thoughts about the others out there.
Textpattern – its lovely, its gorgeous, but its complicated to get exactly the way you want it – also I don’t know about user control with it.
Drupal – Solid and reliable with good user managment – but admin side isn’t that good
PHP-Nuke/Post Nuke – sadly the Nuke’s have spent the last few years adding more clutter to the system without actually improving the core functionality – definately not reconmmended
Mambo – excellent CMS – i ‘ve ran into a few problems with component installation and also USer groups/permissions but This is what i use for
https://persevere.lineages.co.uk
If theres only one or two admins/publishers mambo is okay but if your looking for more publishers then i’d wait for the next version due soon
Ezpublish – not that ez in my opinion – powerful but complicated to deploy

Love the site – great design & strong identity two things though (pet pevs’ ) 1. your title tag is empty and 2. your lacking the old meta keyword and description tags….

cool wee kitten

Cool design , very well done. My one comment is my usual note of a lack of meta tags (does nobody like them or something? – am I stuck in some 1990’s time warp back when meta tags were important)???

I have to agree with Oisin – nice photo’s let down by the design. Also over my poor wee dialup the page takes a very long time to load – I would cut down on the number of images/posts per page Also if your wanting people to hire you and this is the principal aim of the site you may wish to make that more prominent

It was broken (Parse error: parse error, unexpected T_CONSTANT_ENCAPSED_STRING, expecting ‘)’ in /home/minimald/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/acronym.php on line 38) when I visited but I like the design – you may want to think about reducing the size of a few of the images on the site though my poor dialup was struggling

I really like the site – very clean and quick to load top notch – one thing I would comment on is the language of the site.
I’ve been involved in the development of number of church sites and the problem is a common one with christian orientated sites is that typically the text and the language used is a bit archiac and overly wordy – and sadly its the trap you fall into here – cut it down and be more succinct.
Search engine optimisation – a few basic things are missing like properly used meta tags and header tags also your title tags aren’t too useful – for instance unless I know that Anderson Grooup deals in audio, video, lighting and acoustic solutions and search specifically for the ‘anderson group’ I am unlikely to find the site. but you also then go from being the anderson group to ‘AGI’

Its good, I appreciate the very minimilistic design but I think you may need the injection of a little colour into the site.
May I also recommend changing the title of the page and also the addition of meta tags

I have to agre with you on the WP thing – WP isn’t a barrier to design but what you often see is wordpress sites with a similar ‘feel’ to them through font choice – colours and layout.
On your site – I looked at in Moz Firefox and its broken with the right hand column overlapping the spacer bar and with the large image which seems to be about font selection (my dutch isn’t that good) on the left hand site under the creative commons licence bit – which I don’t think is what you intended. Also in your header graphic the text and corners look ‘jaggy’ at 1024*768 – you may want to smoth them off a bit

Nice site, my only comment would be about the use of an image map for site navigation which presents a number of accesibility issues (for users without images and for search engines). May I suggest either UL based buttons/tabs or the addition of text links at the bottom of the page for site navigation. Also, you may want to add meta keyword/description tags
Also bizarrely (and I don’t know why) but in Firefox/Win the title of the page appears as “[object HTMLImageElement] “…actually i’ve just refreshed the page and thats now sorted – some bizarre quirk thing happening…

I use WordPress, integrated with miniBB and DWODP to power a
https://www.lineages.co.uk&#8221;>genealogy news site
So far we haven’t had any problems with it falling over. The one problem I’ve had and still have is integrating the site search – ie the search engine can’t search MiniBB and vice versa….

“If you don’t mind, I’ll steal the basic design that you came up for one of them, and then start working on some others.” – help yourself mate thats what its there for
“The CSS fixes you provided did the trick…I didn’t realize I’d missed something so fundamental to the CSS syntax. That was driving me nuts trying to fix it!” – easy enough done
That drop down archive works really well, which is great – I’ll have to rememember that for the future I’m sure it’ll come in handy .

Happens to us all mate ??