Custom CMS - hired programmers that I am unsure of - need advice

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 16:05:19 -0700

Hello,

(If I am in the wrong area of the forum, please excuse me. I am not familiar with programming languages. I just know my question is about a custom CMS and the programmers I hired are using my SQL. Please advise me if there is a different location I need to post my question in.)

I am a web designer and I really need some advice. I used to work on teams with programmers, but have been working on my own for many years now – outsourcing the programming on all of my projects.

My most recent project is for a very large company – it is the largest I’ve done on my own. I’ve hired a company to do the CMS panel and am really concerned that they are screwing me over.

When I originally hired them, I explained that my client will need the simplest, easy to update CMS panel possible. They admitted that they chose the CMS software before understanding the design. Also, they are using their own CMS software called “Carbon”. Now we are 4 months into the project and I am wondering if they are just trying to make the best of a bad choice – and that it is a bad solution for my needs.

It was explained to the programmers that the people updating this site would be non-programmers and that the client needs to be able to add links and banners where needed but that there needs to be a lot of restrictions because there is a strict style guide (this design is being implemented in 30 countries) that cannot be altered.

If anyone has time to help me, the testing site is: http://www.host3e.com/projects/2008/october/mtn
The admin panel is: http://www.host3e.com/projects/2008/october/mtn/admin/
User name: admin
Password: 123456

My questions are:
• Does this CMS solution seem appropriate?

• Shouldn’t they have custom built many of these layouts?

• Banners for the left side of the pages need to be uploaded through a banners link – others updated through the pages links.

• Some things like the grey lines in the tables (see: http://www.host3e.com/projects/2008/october/mtn/index/partner-discounts) have to be manually edited in the source code – which is accessible through the CMS. The tables on all pages are manually built through the editor so the client needs to understand everything about coding tables.

I have many more questions but will keep it at that.

Because the programmers are 3 months late on this project, I am seeing everything in a negative light. Now I’m wondering if I’m expecting too much from the CMS. I’ve never had to work on a CMS system of this size with this many different layouts.

(The programmers are currently working on the CMS…so there are a lot of things not functioning properly. Some issues look really messed up – I’m also scared they are unfixable because I don’t understand.)

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
Marija

Re: Custom CMS - hired programmers that I am unsure of - need advice

Sat, 07 Mar 2009 23:07:21 -0700

Couldn't help to notice the meta data is off... There are other things that are just about perfect... If you want to be certain the search engines will even pick up on your content w/o html developers or validating WYSIWYGs, you'll need to see that text is a 'text node' and you're good:)

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