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Site Rebuilds

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Every once in a while I get the rare opportunity to work with someone who has big plans, a great idea, tons of energy and little to no budget. Most of the time I have to decline these projects, but this particular project is near and dear to my heart. Probably because it a family member and they are trying to re-establish themselves on the internet.

We've all heard the horror stories of people taking their businesses online, getting their "buddy" to build the site for them and then never really walking them through the process of updating the site or showing them all the features. Worse yet, is getting someone ( a client) to a certain point and then abandoning them because you've run out of web design skills and programming knowledge.

This is in fact what happened to a family member of mine.

We've all heard the saying:

Never hire family or friends

And from my experience that's sound advice, however sometimes you need to be able to call on those that have a particular level of expertise in a certain body of knowledge. Mine just happens to be in an area that a family member could us. So I'm going to attempt to rebuilt their site, starting with a better presentation layer and then moving to the CMS after that.

I think for this it will be fitting to create some before and after images so we can grasp what wasn't working and determine what now is working.

First things first. The site we are going to rebuild or at least make look a heck of a lot better is this: Ripped4Less.com. It started off pretty good, and was built with the best intentions, but it fails to bring forward the pieces of eCommerce that are essential.

Here is a list of things I see that aren't well suited for an eCommerce site:

• Front page is too cluttered
• Images are too big
• Contact Us page doesn't allow us to contact them
• Navigation is hard to understand
• What no deal of the day? Or specials?

So these are just a few of the issues that I see, I'm sure there are more as I dig a little deeper. There are however other issues that don't have to do with the website. One of the biggest being that the owner of the website isn't a web programmer. All they want to do is update the site with new products, deleted old products or change the prices. They would like the ability to track orders and send out newsletters. Seems to me to be a fairly easy request, especially with all the opensource packages that are out on the market these days.

The current site is built with Joomla, which itself is a good tool, but in this case it's an older version and the theme has been hacked to shreds. So with the redesign of the site, there also needs to be an update to the CMS, as long as Joomla is going to hang around.

As you can see there is a lot going on with this site, and there is going to be a lot of work to rebuild it. Funny how at the moment it isn't my only rebuild project, it just happens to be the one that seems the most interesting.

I'll be back with more as the site moves from concept to reality.

Current Projects

In Production