This is still a frequently asked question among small business owners when the time comes to overhaul their website.  There are lots of quick responses, but the complete answer requires a bit of historical context.

The Dark Ages

In the early days of the internet (up until about 6-8 years ago) if you visited a web page with your browser, there was a pretty good chance that the page you were looking at was actually an HTML document on a server somewhere.   If you changed the document, then the page was updated.  For smaller static sites that was fine, but as sites got larger and the need to regularly update the site became more critical, (both to maintain your Search Engine Ranking and to keep traffic coming to the site) there needed to be a way to move past having individual documents for each page in your site.

Enter the CMS

The Content Management System (CMS) is the tool you use to provide scalability and consistency to your site.  It is an application that runs on your webserver (in much the same way that a program would run on your computer)  This application is connected to a database that stores all of the content for your website as well as images and templates.  

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A mobile testing strategy is an important part of ensuring that your new web design will translate well onto the handheld/tablet platform.  Even if you are reformatting your content specifically for the smaller screen, there are still wide differences within mobile browsers and how they interpret standards compliant code.  With iOS and Blackberry now using Webkit based browsers (the basis for Apple’s Safari browser as well) you can make solid assumptions about what will render properly.  Android, with it’s growing segment of the market, is a slightly different story.  With a panoply of phones/tablets/personal music players running an entire menu of Android versions including Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread and now Honeycomb; testing takes on a whole new level of complexity.  Google provides an emulator with their Android SDK and it’s pretty flexible, but it’s unbelievably slow.  Especially on the Mac platform; it’s really unusable.  We went looking for a device that would work with all of these versions of Android, plus have access to the market so we could install Dolphin, Opera and other 3rd party browsers.  We found our solution in a rather unusual place.

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We recently launched a new site for The Neuromodulation Foundation.  It’s designed as a reference for physicians interested in using Neuromodulation to reduce chronic pain.
Our efforts were focused on the backend of the site which is supported with ExpressionEngine.  When the site is fully populated it will support over a thousand entries managing related posts, bibliography and analysis documents.  http://www.neuromodfound.org

We recently partnered with Claude on a new site for the Johns Hopkins Brain Science Institute.  He and his team provided the beautiful design, while we rendered it into standards compliant HTML.  Using Expressionengine as the CMS to manage the site, we focused our development efforts on automation and ease of use while our technical team provided hosting and domain support.

www.brainscienceinstitute.org

Wow, it seems like it’s taken forever.  The ExpressionEngine v2 release is tomorrow.  Having tested the beta for some time now I’ll be glad to finally be able to discuss it in detail.  I’m also planning to put together some training on using Code Igniter with EE.  It’s refreshing that the developers at EllisLab have indicated that release 2.1 will be production-ready along with the acknowledgement that the current 2.0 version is still not quite ready for primetime.  It’s a huge jump forward though and one that will make the argument for EE over other CMSs such as Drupal and Joomla much easier to make.

Now we just need Brandon Kelly to fasttrack the Playa Plugin.