Thread

Hello all,

I have a site that I am building at the moment for a medium sized company. They have given me the general layout and site map. The problem is I am not sure what to use to lay the site out, should I use the pages module, build weblogs for each page, etc..

This is the layout, the bullet points are subs of the larger group. (s) means it will be a static page. I would like the URLs to remain neat and user friendly.

Who we are –

•  Our Vision (s)
•  Our Values (s)
•  Our Leadership (s)
•  Our History (s)
•  Our Awards

What we do –

•  Our Services
•  Our Practices
•  Our Expertise

How we work with you –

•  Our Approach (s)
•  Our Methodologies (s)
•  Our Partners

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I should build this site. I am just new with ExpressionEngine, hence the trivial post.

It’s okay, we were all new to EE at some point! I think a really good start on using EE would be to check out Mike Boyink’s free tutorials over at Train-ee - http://www.train-ee.com/courseware/free-tutorials, specifically the Building a Small Business Site.

It’s does a good job of showing you what EE is capable of right out of the box, before you start looking at other modules and such.

Thanks for the mention Tony.

I hate to make a pitch here for commercial products - but in this case the ExpressionEngine Architecture screencast sounds like a perfect answer to the question.  It was created for EE 1, but all the principles would apply to a EE 2 site.

The architecture decisions are anything but trivial - poor choices at this stage can really come back to haunt you down the road.

Thanks for your replies. That information was very useful and pending approval the company will be buying more videos from your site. Based on those posts I have decided to layout the site like this.

Homepage ( 3 buttons) -> 5 buttons per homepage button -> each button leads to multiple pieces of information, which may be on their own site or aggregated.

I was thinking that I would use one weblog for each path off the homepage, categories for the five buttons, and then have their sub content as individual weblog entries.

So for this path: Click homepage button, click awards button, multiple awards. So category awards, multiple posts for awards as we recieve them.

Does this implementation make sense? I feel like this would be the best approach.

If I were building the site out I’d need to know more about the entire site’s content (you mentioned awards so that’s one type of content).

With EE what I’ve found over the years is that starting with doing a content type inventory is the more valuable way to start planning.  How that content washes out into the navigation is a later step.

If I had just scrolled up…:)

One approach would have the following as separate weblogs/channels:

Who We Are
Awards
Services
Practices
Expertise
How We Work
Partners

But depending on the what the Services/Practices/Expertise content looks like that may be consolidated into one “What We Do” Channel with categories for “Services/Practices/Expertise”.

Thanks alot for your help. This has made a big difference.

I have another question for you though, is it possible to have an upload field where someone can upload a resume to the site without having to login. I know about the stand-alone entry forms, but it says you have to log-in to use these.

Hey Coop, check out Solspace’s Freeform module, I think that should fit the bill exactly.

That looks like it will work. Thanks.