C&C please - printing company website, very easy to use?

edanto

Just set up a small website for a client, and this one really has been cheap and easy to do - it'll work out at less than a grand (for the client) over three years including everything, and includes easy file transfer, website, hosting, email.

It was very simple to set up, but I'd like to know if there's a cheaper way, particularly to mimic the file sharing side of things. I'm thinking of experimenting with joomla or drupal in the future.

At the moment, the site is on a template CMS made by goprint2.com, DNS is with letshost and email etc is GApps.

Scotty #

Joomla is great. I can't really say it's better than Drupal 'cause I've never really used Drupal but I've never found anything that I couldn't do with Joomla. There is an extension, module, plugin, for just about anything you can think of.

There is a great free component for Joomla called Docman (http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/82/details) which provides easy file sharing.

edanto

Thanks. Docman might be just the ticket.

What do you think of the site as it is? Obviously it's ridiculously plain, and some of the text is a bit off, but as a concept, I think it's pretty good. Dead easy for customers to upload files for printing, which was the main request.

littlegreenman

I'd agree with Scotty. I've only praise for Joomla. Extensions and components are plentiful, those that are commercial are reasonably prices. There's tonnes of books and online support material. I've found themeing a Joomla to be very easy as the bulk of the time is spent on CSS.

As costs go - Joomla is free. If you are fortunate to have Fantastico via your hosting provider you can install it very easily. If you're on a budget you can buy a theme and work from that. Custom design costs vary.

With regard to moving a site. We've been a bit fortunate as some of our clients were on cPanel, which meant that we could transfer everything, including email/ftp setups, ssl certs at the click of a button.

If you're not so fortunate, but you have SSH access on both systems you could tarball their public folder, and use wget on your server to copy it across - usually takes a couple of minutes to do. Emails and other settings would need to be done manually.

edanto

Thanks for the tips about redeveloping the site.

I'm interested in C&C of the site as it is though - it's a very basic template and I've little to no control of the layout/design.

The main advantage of this site, though, is how easy it is to submit a file for printing. Customers don't have to worry if their file is too big for emailing. If anyone has some time to test that side of things, I'd like to know what you think of it - just include 'test' in your username and they'll know not to contact you with a quote!

Print Procedure is only a new printing agency, and a proper website will take a few months to plan and build - whereas this little site could tide them over during that time.

There are some small bugs that I've noticed and asked the template people to work on (e.g. Ireland wasn't in the drop down list and now it is & a new customer has to put their email address in twice for some reason which is a bit stupid & I can't get Google Analytics tracking code into it)

We'd be very grateful if someone independent could test out the file submission side of things and let us know how it works in their hands.

grahamor

The site isnt bad, just a few things i noticed

• You are using framesets ! aaaahhhhh
• It's really slow
• You are using tables for the layout
• All the pages have the same url because of the framesets. This is terrible for SEO

I hope my comments are useful to you