Cosmosart, fresh refresh

Permalink 13 Posted in: Design ExpressionEngine Technology

After almost a year and a half, some serious change was made. Site width was moved from 800px to 1024px. I stopped with optimising site for viewing it in IE6 (IE6 is dead, you know). News are more organised, now with categories and comments.

I gave up on doing my CMS, testing it, testing his security etc. So, thanks to great folks from EllisLab, and their great cms called ExpressionEngine, finally I have decent and fully flexible web publishing system.

Old Cosmosart design

Old site was based on ASP with combination of Access database. The site was fast, but after one year, you have a “code chaos”, you don't know where is what etc. Site was running on three different languages, English, like default language, Spanish and Croatian.

There was news, something very simple, one, maybe two paragraphs and one photo for each news. And that's all. About page with pure information about me, definitely nothing short (upss). Before I opened a different domain for my photos, I was using a part of cosmosart like photo gallery. But now, all my photos, are at www.davorphotos.com.

Old portfolio

Portfolio was separated by few categories, Web, Print and Photos. Opening a portfolio category, you had a list of my works with last work opened. It was very simple to navigate and view them. Contact page contained contact form, my email list, and IM names. I didn't had much contact with visitors, beside the statistics from were are they coming and what are they looking for.

New Cosmosart design

In the meaning of design, the “look” didn't change so much, old version had stars, new version have stars, the colours are almost the same, so, maybe, there will not be that wooaaauu effect, if you were hanging on the old site. I tried to be focused more on the content, to organise things to be more user friendly. Hope that I did it.

News

Huge difference from the old site, are news/blog posts grouped by categories and with possibility to comment them, which is very useful when you need a opinion direct from your visitors.

About and Contact page

Is almost the same like from the old site. Few updates in the information about me, and that's all.

Portfolio

Here you can see the difference. Opening one project, you have a list of all works on the right side, and at the bottom you have other categories to select and view works from it. When you open a project, you can find one, or more printscreens of the site and site information. At the bottom, you can navigate throw the category of the selected project.

Right side boxes

On the right side, below the main menu, you can find some boxes, about box (with short info about me), category list, friend list, equipment, four random photos from my photography site, and banner box. The boxes are viewable depending on what page are you looking.

Footer

For now, in the footer you can find five last entries of the blog, and the last five entries of the portfolio. I have some planes to put some interesting things there, but for now, it's only that.

ExpressionEngine

ExpressionEngine is one of the most flexible and powerful CMS on the market. His is very secure and fast, using his own tags, you don't need to now anything about programming etc. Of course, you need to read the documentation, but after first moments, you would be very happy using it.