Thread

I’ve been looking at Ektron, although I really can’t find out much by looking at their site. Ektron costs about $10,000, and the sales rep swears it’ll do everything I want and more.

I’m a bit familiar with Joomla, Mambo, and WordPress, as I run those on a few sites. Thing is, I don’t really have much time to mess around with stuff. EE, with its integrated forums, looks like it might work really well for another site I want to build.

One thing I do NOT like about Joomla is how it creates categories and sections. For example, if I understand how it works, I need to do something like this:

http://www.my site.com/sports/baseball

when I’d much rather just do this:

http://www.my site.com/baseball

I remember pMachine and considered buying it once or twice, but never did. I just read something good about EE on http://www.websitepublisher.net (a good webmaster site and forum), so I hopped on over here.

At any rate, EE looks pretty affordable compared to a lot of other things out there, so I may try it.

It is always best to choose the software that best suits your style and helps you fulfill the goals for your site. 

I’m not quite sure if you’re asking a question above - but if you have specific questions or a project you want to know if EE is good for, then feel free to post and we’ll be more than happy to address your concerns. =)

Okay, I do have a more concrete question—how hard is it to get an EE site custom-designed? I wouldn’t want to trust my Geocities sense of design! 😛

Well, what is your familiarity with html and css?  EE uses templates - the design is totally under your control - you just plop down EE tags where you want the EE content to appear.  You can look at the Showcase: http://expressionengine.com/showcase - to see the huge variety of designs people have accomplished in EE.

I’ve no doubt that a nice looking site can be built with EE; I just don’t want to do it myself. I’m okay with HTML and CSS, but I’m no designer.

I’ll take a look at the Dev Network thingy.

Oh!  I misunderstood, my apologies.  Well it should not be hard at all depending on how much of the work you want to do. You could get a template off say, Open Source Web Design and drop in the dynamic tags where you want the content pulled.  If you want someone to build the site for you entirely then post on the Job Board or contact some of the Pro Network (http://expressionengine.com/professionals) for quotes =)

But shouldn’t be hard at all, even for someone not used to EE, really.

Also, just to add, we make a number of themes available.  These are “drop in” themes that work with the default EE setup.  There have been some other nice community themes made available as well.  Off the top of my head, I can think of a hemmingway port (apologies, not link onhand) and bartleme.