Corrosive Online
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Web Design
ModX News Site - Part One
Warning!
Before we get started I just want to draw your attention to one thing. This is NOT a tutorial aimed at telling you how to build a website using ModX (otherwise it would be in the 'tutorial' section). This is a journey through a project and does not provide any step-by-step guides to recreating what I have done. If that was what you were actually after when arriving on this page I would like to recommend this ModX tutorial by Mary at The Coding Pad as a great place to start. That said, let's get on with it!
Introduction
I absolutely love 'Magazine Style' layouts for websites. I think they are clean and crisp and some of the best ones can look very smart indeed. By 'Magazine Style' I mean any website that has a front page aggregated from the content inside the website and that makes use of columns and banners to create uniform pages and navigation making finding the infomation you want quick and easy. Examples of good magazine websites are; Chow (the food based website), The BBC, FHM (UK mens magazine) and British Vogue (UK womens magazine).
All of these websites follow the magazine layout formula and yet with their own individual styles applied to the design.
Although Corrosive Online is a clean, column based layout with articles and tutorials it does not have the aggregation of content on the front page to fully be called a magazine web layout so I have embarked on a journey to try and create a true magazine layout of my own. I decided to build a website called 'Daily UK News'. It will probably never run as a daily news website (unless I find someone interested in taking it on) but it will act as a great piece to show prospective Yoto clients and a valuable learning experience.
Choosing a platform for the project was pretty easy. I knew that I would have to use one of the CMS (Content Management System) available on the web as a news website would need to be updated and added to quickly and easily by any number of users with little or no web experience. I have tried a number of CMS platforms in the past and none quite compare to ModX CMS for flexibility and reliability.
It is only fairly recently that I have started to use ModX CMS and also offer websites based on the CMS framework via our web design company Yoto Creative. I already love using ModX for client websites as, unlike other CMS out there, the designer is king with ModX. It is pretty easy to take your own design from scratch and 'plug in' the web-based page management and update functionality of ModX without compromising the layout you want. This frees you up as a designer to make offer clients a totally bespoke design that they can up-date themselves. This has advantages over conventional websites where only the designer can make updates. It can get quite annoying for both designer and client when e-mails have to go back and forth to complete even simple updates or changes to content. It is also far better than one of these 'build your own website in minutes', template based products, as you get a designers touch and attention to detail rather than a selection of pre-made templates that may be the basis of another thousand websites out there.
ModX also makes the addition of the common features of a news website simple by using pre-built 'snippets' of code. You can add a search facility, comments, RSS feed and the article aggregator function itself by 'calling' the snippets that come with the ModX download and using them in the website pages. The last great thing about ModX is the levels of access you can set. For instance and administrator (or web designer) will have full access to all of the HTML files whereas a web user (or the client) will only have access to the content meaning that the page design always stays intact.
With my platform chosen the next thing was to create my front page design and this is what I will cover off in part two.
