mark.funkncreative.net Front end engineer

The secret to a (really) CHEAP website!

One word… Wordpress.

If you dont already know, wordpress is a completely free, open-source ‘blog’ management software. It can be downloaded and installed on most servers with ease, and has thousands of free themes, widgets and add-ons.

But it is for blogs, I want a website?

Yes, it is true that wordpress is aimed towards a blog style website, but they also give you complete freedom over how that website looks and works.

And you get a full ‘content manageable’ website, with a great admin backend!

So the idea is, you provide someone like me with a design, or get me to design you a layout, then I build you custom wordpress theme.

The cost for this usually ranges between 700 - 2000 euros depending on the complexity of the design and the functionality you require on the site.

That is a cheap website!!

Also, the best thing to do to keep the cost down, is to find a current wordpress site, or theme that is close to what you want and can be modified to fit your needs.

Here are some examples of wordpress sites that I like:

www.pieterfrank.com

http://spoutcreative.com/

http://amourchaleur.com/

http://www.absolutebica.com/

http://www.shomalgan.com/blog/

To find themes, just google ‘free wordpress themes’

New office on the Vijzelstraat

Im now working from a great new location, Vijzelstraat 68, room 2.03. Feel free to make an appointment to meet and discuss your web ideas.

Dropping support for Internet Explorer 6 - ie6

So as of March09 I, with a large number of fellow developers, and some big players (facebook, MobileMe… ) will drop support for IE6.

It sounds a bit rough right? Well let me explain…

Anyone who has built a website or web application will have known the pain that is working with Microsofts IE6. From slow rendering, to a long list of CSS display bugs, they seem to have made more things wrong than they did right with this piece of ‘software’.

There are so many better options now in the browser world, e.g Firefox, Safari, Chrome, why do people still use this piece of %#&@ IE6?!?

The biggest answer, corporations. Their nerdy systems administrators would have been very proud back in the day when they unveiled their ‘very secure’ intranets running on Windows. But, back in those days what you got with your nice new office network was Internet Explorer 6, or God forbid, earlier on, IE5.5.

Nowadays, corporations are still stuck with this almost 8 YEAR OLD browser because it is either that they have intranets that will die in a modern browser or really lazy system administrators, or both.

“It came out a few weeks before the Twin Towers fell. It came out before the Nintendo GameCube. It came out before the first iPod.”

This thing is OLD, it has had its time, and now it is time to go.

So, what does this mean for the average website? In my stance, it will mean adding a notice to every site I build reminding the IE6 user that their browser is out of date, and if they wish to experience the full features of the website they should upgrade.

This notice will only be shown to someone using IE6 through the use of a conditional comment, and will provide links to current browser downloads.

There may also be less javascript functionality for IE6 users, depending on the site and it’s complexity.

Of course, if you want me to build your company a super amazing intranet interface, and it really has to be IE6 friendly, im more than happy to do so.

But if its on the web, then IE6 is dead.