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New Website Finally Launched!

Its taken a while, but I finally got round to revamping my own website. You’re looking at the brand new nickfoxall.com. The previous site served its purpose well, but it dates back to 2006 — that’s about 15 Internet years, so it was long overdue for an update!

My old site was all flat-file. That is, individual static HTML pages, each one of which had to be updated and maintained separately — a pain! Consequently, I didn’t update it that often, and the site was starting to languish. Not good when you’re in the business of designing and building websites.

The old site was also my first real stab at CSS and XHTML and was quite well optimized for search engines. It did bring in quite a few inquiries, mainly via Google, and it certainly generated business. But the web has changed considerably in the last three years, and I’ve also moved on, expanding my film and video related services, and becoming involved with Chickenfish.TV.

Look Ma, No Flash!

Another problem was Flash. With the old site, I’d already decided to move away from Flash for the overall site itself, but for the portfolio elements — particularly the video section — I still used Flash and Flash video. I also had to host the videos themselves on my own site, which takes up server space and eats up bandwidth. Since then, the number of good quality online video platforms has mushroomed (beyond just YouTube), so its now relatively easy to maintain, embed and distribute an almost unlimited film and video portfolio via these platforms.

I’m using Vimeo, and also relative newcomer ExposureRoom, who have some nice HD playback features. Okay, yeah, when you play a video from my site, these services are still using a Flash-based player to deliver and play the video, but at least there’s no Flash here now. This reduces the load on my server, and makes the site more search engine friendly.

No More Static

The other big move for me, and one that was inevitable really, was to get away from flat, static, Dreamweaver-managed websites — not just for me, but for my clients as well. The explosion in blogging had generated a number of server-based tools for updating and managing blog sites, the most widely used of which is still probably WordPress.

Tools like these allow you (and me) to create and maintain dynamic websites; ones where the content can be entered, updated and maintained entirely separately from the page code and the page layout. The pages themselves become templates or containers, into which content is ‘injected’ and presented dynamically, depending on what the visitor is looking for. Content entries (articles, stories, musings, photo collections, etc) can be related to each other dynamically too, either by categorising with keywords and tags, or via search and sort tools.

So, of course, my new site is dynamic too.

I’m using ExpressionEngine, a content management system that started life as a blogging tool just like WordPress, but that has evolved into a fully functional, fully customisable web publishing platform. I’d evaluated all of the major web content tools out there, and settled on ExpressionEngine for a number of reasons, and I’ve been building client sites on it November 2008.

There are many reasons why I like it, and there are many reasons why I recommend it (see separate blog post, coming soon), but primarily, for me it was;

• Easy to Understand: I’m not a programmer or coder by trade. I’m a designer. I’m visual. I prefer to spend my time designing and creating sites that have a strong visual identity, are accessible and are easy to navigate. ExpressionEngine has a learning curve to be sure, but its far less steep and daunting than most of the other content platforms out there.
• Great Support: you pay money for ExpressionEngine. Not a lot, but in return you get dedicated support, from people working full time on ensuring the platform works for you, and ultimately works for the client. That’s a huge plus compared to the free platforms, where you have to rely solely on the user community to solve problems. Speaking of which…
• Great Community: ExpressionEngine has a growing and very dedicated user community out there: one that is helpful, resourceful and will go out of its way to help you resolve problems, especially when you’re starting out. Many in the user community have developed add-ons and additional software that give their sites greater functionality, then made these add-ons available to the rest of the ExpressionEngine user community. Bottom line is, if you can’t do something, you can probably find someone who can.

Oh Yeah: My Work!

So yes, I’m still successfully designing and building custom websites for clients (see under ‘Web Development’ for some recent case studies). And I’m increasing doing freelance film and video work. Check out some of my more recent projects under ‘Film + Video’.

Going forward, I’m going to be expanding my video services as demand for web-based content continues to grow. Watch this site!

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