Tell us about yourself

Chad Crowell: My name is Chad Crowell, Owner and Principal Developer at Web Inception, a website development and marketing company based in Novato, CA.  I’ve been a professional website developer since 1997 and casually interested in web building since I took a Multimedia Production class at CSU Sacramento in about 1994.  Web Inception has been around officially since 2001 as I built websites as side jobs for clients while working various full time web development jobs. In April 2007, I began working for myself full time.

Tell us about 50fabulous.com?

Chad Crowell: 50+Fabulous is owned by a FABULOUS woman named Pattie, who has been one of my favorite clients and really was fun to work with.  The site was about 18 months old when she came to me, and had been maintained manually by her using a combination of Dreamweaver and a custom content management system.  It was cumbersome and time consuming to maintain, and Pattie knew there was a better way.

50+Fabulous is a magazine-style site with quite a lot of content.  It is a lifestyle site geared toward women who are over 50.  Its goal is to empower women by helping them find ways to enhance their lives.  The breadth of content and experience of the contributors lends a healthy air of professionalism to the content.

When I took on the project, there were almost 200 columns written by about 15 authors, plus regular contributions from Pattie herself.  The content was divided up into several weblogs including columns, Pattie’s blog, product reviews, profiles, and about a half dozen more.  The redevelopment project also called for a discussion forum and complete graphical redesign, as well as registration for prizes and a full member administration system.

What led you to choose ExpressionEngine?

Chad Crowell: I quoted on this project in September of 2007 and was finishing up two ExpressionEngine-based sites at that time.  These two sites were the first two I had built with ExpressionEngine and I had really embraced the system as a way to quickly build and deploy sites with quite a bit more flexibility and administration tools than I was used to providing clients.  I had traditionally relied on Dreamweaver to do the heavy lifting of database connectivity and data movement in websites, but once I had reason to become more efficient when I began consulting full time, I had to find something better and more usable.

I actually started those initial two sites over three times - I had run across CodeIgniter and really felt it could give me the efficiency that I was seeking.  It provided all the heavy lifting tools that I had used in Dreamweaver for years, but allowed me to employ methods and tools that were more robust and secure than I had knowledge of in the past. However, I couldn’t quite get my head around CodeIgniter at the time, and didn’t have time to spend doing so, so I reverted to Dreamweaver and started over.  After a few days, I again stalled out, frustrated. I happened to find my way to Kathy and Joelle’s Moxie Design Studios website while looking for inspiration.  From there I ran into ExpressionEngine, and seeing that it was a sibling of CodeIgniter, I gave it a look. When I realized that it had all the pre-built tools I had been hunting for, the search was over.  I rebuilt those two sites in ExpressionEngine and learned my way around it, and have not looked back since.

50+Fabulous became my next project, and with a full understanding of ExpressionEngine, I knew instantly that it was a perfect fit for 50+Fabulous, and I was able to really test the limits of ExpressionEngine’s native functionality with this site.

What part of the site are you most proud of?

Chad Crowell: The extensive use of some of ExpressionEngine’s core tools - weblogs, comments, categories, custom fields, templates.  Having just gotten into using ExpressionEngine, I was really proud of how quickly I learned to employ these basic tools at an advanced level.

A good example is the connection between a contributor on the site, their custom profile page that includes a full bio and list of columns they have written, the categorized list of columns that serves as the main site navigation, and the individual column pages that connect back to the author’s page and category page that it belongs to.  ExpressionEngine made it very easy to interconnect these pages and allow users to follow a logical path from content to author to similar content.

To take that theme even further, the ability to link from a category page to a forum category dedicated to that category’s content and the ability to link to other types of content on the site based on similar categories really gives an information architect some powerful tools for helping the user find more content throughout the site that may be of interest to them.

The other thing I really love about this site is the modularity.  I used an extensive set of small chunks of content to fill out the site.  The bulk of the content resides in the center column, as with most three-column sites, and once we filled out the bulk of the content, Pattie wanted to place small “ads” for other content in the sidebars.  These are each a template, included in any given page via the Embed function. This allows us to easily move content around and place it anywhere on the site that is appropriate.

How did Pattie receive the site?  What was her favorite part?

Chad Crowell:  Pattie really loves the site- we worked very closely =through the design and development process.  Pattie was a public relations professional in her previous career, so she already had a lot of great information about her audience.  That helped us during many design and organizational decisions.  So she was very hands-on, more so than pretty much any client I’ve had in the past.

I think her favorite part of the site is the homepage.  There is a lot of content within this site, and a lot of new content to come in the future, so creating an organized layout for the homepage was a challenge.  There are many different sections of the site, each deserving of some top billing, so we considered many wireframe layouts, and once the existing data was in the system, lightweight live data comps, to decide what data would live where on the homepage.  Pattie wanted it to really have some graphical pop, so we mixed large colorful graphics with sections of headlines and summary data in the grid.  The result is really eye catching and geared pretty well toward her audience of women over 50.

How about the community?

Chad Crowell:  The community section of 50Fabulous.com is brand new as of the site launch, and something Pattie has not dealt with before as an administrator.  She’s been hard at work filling some open contributor positions with the company and is just beginning to formulate a plan to get her forum rolling.  We’ve talked extensively about how she can drive her new site members to the forum, and she realizes that the forum is one of the most powerful tools she has to build her community.

It was pretty easy to show Pattie how to be a forum administrator/moderator with the integrated forum management that ExpressionEngine has built into the Control Panel, and she really liked the fact that a single login could get her members into the forums as well as the rest of the site.  Its features like this that make ExpressionEngine an easy sell, and my CMS of choice.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Chad Crowell: As I am finishing this interview with Lisa Wess from EllisLab, I am in my bedroom on vacation in Mazatlan, Mexico.  I had a frantic instant message from Pattie earlier today when I jumped on the computer for a few minutes, in which she said that there was a section of data that she didn’t want visible to the casual visitor on her site, something we had overlooked in building out the site.  Even though I am not working while on this trip, I was able to make the necessary changes within five minutes of receiving her message and upload a revised template, and the problem was solved.  I had a happy client, and I lost just a few minutes of my vacation- a win-win situation in my book - thanks to the flexibility and versatility of ExpressionEngine.