I recently had the opportunity to beta test an early version of CMS from scratch - a new simple and easy to use content management system developed by Ben Hunt - web designer and creator of Web Design from Scratch.

One of the most frustrating aspects of content management systems that I have tried in the past is the actual integration of the systems into an existing website, it’s rarely straightforward and tends to involve a certain amount of programming knowledge combined with lots of trial and error. This is where CMS from scratch impresses - it really is simple to implement it into existing HTML pages. Sections of a page can be converted to ‘includes’ and these can be edited without having to mess with the page structure. These ‘includes’ can be anything from the meta description in the head section of a page to a paragraph of formatted text.

As a designer you have complete control over which sections of a site are client editable, this ensures a client can’t mess with the structure of their site and also cuts out all the unnecessary clutter - they only see the bits relevant to them, which in turn provides a much cleaner and easier to use interface.

CMS from scratch isn’t open source, it costs £100 for a single license, when you consider what you get for your money I personally think it’s worth the investment -

• Quick to implement and easy to use
• Unbranded, you can brand it for your clients
• Support and help direct from the developers

CMS from scratch can be tried free of charge for 14 days, to see the system in action take a look at this demonstration video.

Although website tools and tests aren’t always 100% accurate they can provide a quick way of finding out some genuinely useful information about how well a site is built and it’s effectiveness in search engines.

These are 3 of my personal favourites -

SEO Analyzer

SEO Analyzer tests how well a site has been built by taking into account factors including whether a page has a semantic structure, download time and use of obsolete & deprecated HTML. These are combined to give a score out of 100, although it is implied that this tool rates the SEO of a site, I think it’s a more useful indicator of if a site has been built to web standards.

Web Page Analyzer

Web Page Analyzer gives a report on the amount of time it would take for your website to load on different connection speeds. It also lists all images, code and scripts used on a page by size.

My only criticism of this tool is that it’s a few years old now and some of the advice given seems to reflect this - “Consider reducing total page size to less than 30K” I think a more realistic page size to aim for is around 100k.

Page Strength

Page Strength gives an overview of the visibility and importance of a page in search engines. It does this by ranking a page on factors such as links from sites including DMOZ & Technorati and domain name visibility in Google, these are combined (along with other factors) to give a web page a score out of 10 along with a brief summary.

Designing a website from scratch can be difficult, some days ideas can seem to be in short supply. When this happens to me I find the following 3 sites helpful for ideas and inspiration.

Inspiration from other designers

Not only is CSS Remix a nice looking site in it’s own right, it also features some of the best CSS based websites. Unlike some showcases it’s updated on a regular basis and you can choose to filter results by award (votes by users) or date added.

Tips, resources & ideas

Although Smashing Magazine does occasionally showcase websites, it also has regular features and articles on all sorts of web related topics. A recent highlight was 35 Designers x 5 Questions.

Inspiration from images

Searching stock image libraries by keywords can be a slightly different way to get ideas early on in a project, iStockphoto is one of the best and contains photographs, illustrations and graphics. It also comes in handy later on in projects when you need to source high quality images.

The redesign of this website had been something I wanted to do for the past year, and after numerous unsuccessful attempts I finally decided on the version you see before you today.

The old design which you can see a jpeg of here, hadn’t seen any significant changes to the design in the 2 years that it had been live, and although it served it’s purpose reasonably well in that time - I felt it was time for a change. (more…)