Jan 2008

Personal Blog

AlexThomas.ch is personal website and blog for Alex Thomas, the founder of Pickin'Art and Paris WebSolutions. The project was undertaken because we had some free time and because we thought it would do Alex some good to have someone to talk to.

Focus on:

• small personal blog
• strong graphical impact
• easy to maintain and update

Stats

• scope:
• complexity:
• cost:

Business Requirements

The aim was to build a simple blog that would be easy to update with regular posts: short tweets of the day's highlights, with new articles, photo galleries, calendar events and so on.

What we did

These days most people use Facebook or one of the other social networking sites for this sort of thing; fair play and frankly, such social networking sites are far far better suited to the task if that's all you want to do; plus you have the added value of instant networking built into those platforms. The real interest of having your own site like this is to differentiate yourself from everyone else. If you're an artist a professional and want to stand out from the crowd, you really do need your own site, in addition to your Facebook or MySpace pages.

The website we built is based on the Joomla CMS, an open source Content Management System that is easy to extend with more specific components for the photo galleries and events list and also, extremely easy to use so that it makes keeping content up to date  and adding new content a breeze.

On top of the CMS platform we implemented a template with a very strong visual impact. The theme was designed to match the clients personality and style.  It's this visual presentation of the content in their own image that sends such a strong message and differentiates it, makes it stand out from the same content posted on Facebook or MySpace.

Outcome

The website was finished very quickly and was running live on our servers within a matter of days. The website makes for a great blog and let's Alex easily add new content whenever he's in the mood to write.  This is important as most such sites are so difficult to maintain that once they're setup people never keep them up to date.

The most successful aspect of this project was the visual theme that was developed; it's "Spot On" was the feedback. Your website should reflect your business or yourself in every aspect of it's implementation, both in terms of content and presentation. Usually our clients are small businesses that aim for a keyed down, serious look. Developing this sort of fun and trendy look for the site was a lot of fun and opened up a whole new style for us to work with.