As you may have noticed, this website has undergone some changes. And while it looks different than before, the biggest changes actually happened in the backend, where you can't see them.
Up until now, Purposedrivenpromotion.com has been hosted on the open source CMS Mambo. We chose it because it was relatively easy to set up (and of course free to use :) ).
But Mambo is one of those systems that, unless you have a lot of resources to manage it, it can become unruly.
That is what we found when using it - because we are a smaller company, we don't have the time or resources to expend on a large CMS. We found Mambo just too big for us.
That's why, after just over a year, we changed to a much smaller, more familiar CMS. One that you may not immediately consider using for website content management.
We had many considerations for our CMS. We wanted something flexible and easy to use, that allowed for various user permissions, but also had the ability to customize as needed.
We have looked at a variety of CMS systems, both open source and paid, and ultimately chose a blog
system.
Why use a blog publishing platform as a CMS?
You are probably wondering why we would go through the hassle of analyzing CMS systems only to chose a blog publishing platform? The answer is simple:
First, a blog platform is very functional - it satisfied our requirements for a CMS. It is small enough to be easily managed, and it is flexible enough to suit our needs.
Plus, we are familiar with the system we chose - Movable Type.
When we first installed Movable Type, it was version 3.2. That was just a couple weeks ago. In addition to this version (it was the currently available version) we also installed a few "plugins." Plugins are little bits of code which are generally freely available (some is also sold commercially) to add functionality to your site. Below are some of the plugins we chose to help with the search engine optimization of our site:
Optimization Tip #1 - CustomFields
We started with the CustomFields
plugin. CustomFields does as it suggests. It allows you to add custom fields to your Movable Type installation.
With custom fields we are able to add fields for optimizing our site - namely a custom title tag, as well as meta description and meta keywords tags.
We added these 3 fields to help control the optimization of our site. In addition to adding links throughout the text to other important pages, we also want to ensure that we can control or influence the search results pages which display our information.
If you are familiar with Movable Type or any other blog platform, then you know that the software generally defaults to displaying a page's title, as you set it when you publish the page. While this may be fine for a blog article, we felt it limited us for the main site.
For example, we do not want our about us page to simply display "about us" in the search results pages. We want to be able to give more information. Hence the need for a custom title tag.
Similarly, we could have used other fields for the meta data but felt it would be better to include these new fields. Plus, should the need arise in the future, we can add more custom fields to our site.
Optimization Tip #2 - OptimizeHTML
While not essential, we wanted to ensure that our code was as clean as it could be. That is where OptimizeHTML comes in.
It allows us to add comments to our templates, along with any other bits of code we need to ensure that critical parts of our templates are not changed. But when the page is published it removes these comments, along with extraneous carriage returns and anything else which normally bloats a website's code.
In fact if you view the source on this, or any page on our site, you will see that we have very few lines of code. Much less than if we did not use this plugin.
While it is not essential that you optimize your HTML in this way it is something we consider a "best practice."
Optimization Tip #3 - Enhanced Entry Editing
Also a non-essential plugin we found EnhancedEntryEditing extremely handy especially when it came to editing our main site pages.
This is because we like to dress them up with graphics, larger fonts and so on, and if you are not an HTML person (or just to lazy to look it up) such a plugin enables you to "cheat."
What it does is provide you with a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor so that you can format your entry the way you want it to display on the page.
We consider this an optimization tip because in the end it is a time saving plugin for not only creating entries, but also for dressing them up.
In the End
After we had Movable Type 3.2 set up the way we wanted it (and functioning quite nicely I might add) Sixapart, the company that produces MT, released a major upgrade.
And since we like to stay on top of things, we upgraded to Movable Type 4 over the weekend.
And while the upgrade went on without a hitch (we were upgraded within about 15 minutes) we did find out that we needed to disable a single plugin in order to log in to the upgraded version of MT.
That's right - the current install of Custom Fields did not play nicely with MT4, so we had to disable it.
A little research and we soon found that this was a common problem with MT. However we found a "hack" on the Custom Fields forums which allowed us to install the latest working beta version of Custom Fields in Movable Type 4. This allowed us to have our custom fields back, however we
had to recreate the data which was there.
While this was not a huge deal for us, I can see where it may be for someone who has hundreds or thousands of pages.
Therefore I would recommend that if you are running MT 3.2 and want to upgrade to 4 by all means do so, but back up everything first, in case you run into problems such as we did. And if you do happen to use custom fields, then I would suggest waiting until all the bugs are ironed out.