I really like the site.

Was it designed yourselves or have you used a theme as a base? I only ask as it has a feeling of a lot of the themes out there for popular cms platforms.

Also the main flash image scroller in the middle took a while to load.

Dan
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Dan Taylor
Director of Search
www.seowned.co.uk

Thanks for that; as for the design, it's a mixture of pieces.

I know the design is relatively common, and in fact we argued for ages about what to use. We took some ideas we'd seen and played with them a bit. I must admit I didn't even want the scroller...it's something we are working to replace. However, I've played with several and haven't found one I like. I'm more inclined to use a static image..

Without ever finding out why, when we first uploaded the scroller it held irregular races..one visit would see it sprinting to get through the images and the next it would be normal. On the same browsers.

I haven't looked at cms themes, I must admit. We don't want to get involved with them just yet as it's not an area we know a lot about - well, not enough to provide a proper service. The only package we know much about in that respect is moodle, and from experience I wouldn't want to try building another moodle site!

Brian

If you ever want to look at a CMS I suggest working with WordPress. The creation of themes is as simple as creating a standard HTML page then dropping some snippets of code in. But the power WordPress is in it extendability. There are thousands of plugins for it that can literally add almost any functionality required and a high percentage are free too.

Good luck with the site.

Dan
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Dan Taylor
Director of Search
www.seowned.co.uk

I see several problems with wordpress.

Firstly, the average user (not those who make money by creating rings of self-promoting blogs and flogging advertising and loads of rehashed articles) doesn't have time or inclination to twiddle with it, the time to constantly make sure that plugins are up to date, that you've got the latest version of wp, to be sure that all the currently known security flaws have been catered for.. Then, having found a combination of 'safe' free plugins and an up to date theme, they have to cope with wordpress doing a couple of updates a year (possibly rendering previously safe plugins ineffective or causing conflicts).

Then, knowing how cms is targetted by hackers (even on my html sites I get hundreds and sometimes thousands of automated hack attempts a month from people who are looking for backdoors or security flaws in wp) they have to be sure that they can either block intrusions (nigh on impossible if faced with a patient hacker who wants to get in and knows enough) or create a decent backup system to repair whatever the hackers get up to. They may never get hacked, but if they do, the damage can be immense - not so much to the site if it is simply ripped up, but to the entire site of someone hacks only to spread viruses or poach data.

No, call me old fashioned but I'd rather have sex with a hedgehog than touch wordpress. Thanks for the comment anyway!