Thread

A few weeks back, I inherited the administrator role on an EE-based blog that I’m a co-author of (actually, I kinda stole it, rather than inheriting it; my co-author who owns the site was bitching and I made him give me control so I could start fixing stuff).

I haven’t written web pages since like 1994ish; my development work has always been on the client & infrastructure side of things, and I have an MBA now and haven’t written code since 2003. So actually building a site, dealing with SEO, cleaning content, etc was all theoretical to me.

It took me all of about 3-4 days to wrap my head around the EE templating system. Started fixing a lot of things and adding small new features. I very quickly got frustrated with the standard templates, because of redundant code everywhere (e.g. adding statcounter support required editing like 10 templates).

So I decided to do a complete site redesign. 3-column, fluid-middle, CSS “holy grail” model, with embeds for head section, page header and footer, and each side column. My biggest issues have been learning CSS (ich; I can’t believe people like this) to deal with the “holy grail” layout in an SEO-friendly way. That took a couple weeks to get where I liked it, with a style guide and palette we were all happy with.

In the intervening weeks, I found a number of issues and bugs. The EE team has been extraordinary in their responsiveness and the quality of those responses. I got solutions to all my questions (at least the ones that were under EE’s control), and the build that came out Friday has fixes for at least 4 bugs that I reported. Amazing turnaround.

I was so impressed that I went ahead and bought my own EE license, and brought EE up on an idle domain that I own. For the last week, I’ve been rebuilding the site from scratch on this 2nd system, with the new template architecture and site design. I’m finishing up some last SEO stuff, and I’ll be launching the real site with the new architecture Monday morning - barely a month after the first time I touched the EE control panel.

A round of applause for the EE team.

During this process, I’ve come up with a number of suggestions for how some bootstrap/learning-curve things can be improved. I’ll write up a post on that in a couple of days.

Thanks folks.

A round of applause for the EE team.

<APPLAUSE!!!>

Yep! EE is great. Takes some time before you get the idea and after that you will never look back to any other system.

I’ve had a very similar experience (with the exception of having to learn/relearn html/css) with EE and the team/community. Almost every question i’ve ever had as been answered within hours if not minutes. My experience was so great that I try to give back to the community as much as possible by helping others out. What goes around comes around!

/applause!