"And I can't help but wonder where I'm bound, where I'm bound." (Tom Paxton)
This is a diary of my progress in building a website, based on Umbraco, for a local community arts centre. The reasons for writing and publishing this are various, but include the following:
- I need a record for my own benefit of what I did, and why I made the decisions I did, because I am bound to have to go back and redo at least parts of it, or reconsider the decisions I took.
- I hope that this record will be of use to others who are in the same position as myself, i.e. starting on the Umbraco learning curve.
- I hope that by publishing this as I go along some readers may be able to assist, or point out where I have taken myself up a blind alley.
- I further hope that this record of a user's view of Umbraco site development, as opposed to a developer's view, may be of use to those who are working on the development of the system.
I am calling this a diary, and it will be updated and extended as I go along. This is a spare-time activity so updates may be a little while in coming, but we all have more to do than time to do it in. Also, in the interests of making it a more useful reference, I am likely to go back and update earlier sections where I found it necessary to change what I had done, rather than keep a strict record of the blind alleys explored and reversed out of.
This will not be a keystroke by keystroke instruction manual, but I hope will include enough detail and pointers to be of use to others.
Background
I have a fairly good background in software development, though am not up to date with all the latest technology, and have only done limited website design. However, in this case I am interested in designing and delivering a website to the client organisation, and really don't want to get into the software technicalities any more than I have to. I accept that I have got to do templates and stylesheets because they embody my unique site design, but beyond that I would ideally like to pick up a black-box toolkit. It probably won't be as easy as that.
The user organisation is a small community arts centre, with little cash, relying on volunteer effort for things such as maintaining its website. Therefore the two fundamental requirements are (1) that the content authoring process is easy to use, and (2) that the solution is cheap (free is ideal).
The centre has a simple static website which is currently maintained using Dreamweaver. I don't need to explain here why I am looking for a CMS. It does mean however that I have an existing design and style to base any new work on.
If anyone has any comments, or improvements, on any of the following please contact me at Tony.Maynard-Smith at ntlworld dot com