New website I made: bijbelvereniging.nl¶

Tags: personal, plone

Last wednesday I finished a website that’s been brewing for a while. http://www.bijbelvereniging.nl . I’m quite happy with it!

On 2007-07-25, I made the initial svn import of the existing website of the bijbelvereniging, a Dutch group that was formerly a member of Gideons international. (There are now two Gideon(-like) groups in the Netherlands, one handing out bibles in public and one placing bibles in hotels/hospitals/jails: the latter one is the bijbelvereniging.)

The old site was a (to me) horrid frame-using websites. More than 10 years old, probably. Frames! I always avoided them like the plague. The html code was horrible. Probably fine in the day when it was made, but… Visually, the site looked fine, btw. Anyway, the site was to be replaced in the near future.

In the end, the replacement process dragged on until around early 2010. Ideas floated around and I got a couple of examples of the new default layout they were using for brochures and paperware. For the implementation, I chose wordpress, though I made an initial prototype in Plone. Reasons?

• I might want to hand the site over to someone else for maintenance: wordpress knowledge is easier to find than Plone knowledge. (Plone is what I’d have used otherwise).
• Small site, so nothing elaborate is needed.
• I had some recent experience (http://www.ngk.nl) with a wordpress website and wordpress wasn’t too bad.
• They wanted it hosted on a regular hosting party, so Plone was pretty much out (I offered to host it on my own server, though, but they stuck to their existing hoster).

What I did?

• I made the layout. Blueprint css framework plus a bit of jquery for the menu, that’s basically it. And a bit of “gimp” image editing for the backgrounds and the header.
• A wordpress theme so I had a cleanly installable nicely-separated collection of php and css that makes up the actual website.
• Added a couple of forms and build up the menu structure.

The actual text and part of the menu? The other images? That’s what “the customer” did, in this case two people from the bijbelvereniging. It was a requirement that they’d be able to change things on their own without having to mail me. Rightfully so. That’s something that should be standard for most sites nowadays.