Selling web design, how to manage content - What is the backend for OzBargain?

stickyfingers on 15/09/2013 - 13:58

So I've recently been asked by a few people to do them a website (for money of course) as they've seen some of the sites I've been doing for fun.
I enjoy doing sites from scratch using HTML & CSS and know a bit of Javascript & PHP. I'm also familiar with CPanel, have past experience with Wordpress and know my way around a Unix/Unix-like system.

So I've been wondering how I would go about this? What would I use to manage the content? Lets say they wanted to update their contact info without having to call me? I'd rather build the website by hand but is there some sort of backend for them to easily manage it?

Also, how does scotty manage OzBargain, is there some sort of backend that it is based on?

Internet

Comments

  • quirki on 15/09/2013 - 15:03

    drupal

    • stickyfingers on 15/09/2013 - 15:26

      I've been looking at Drupal & phpWebSite today.
      By 'drupal' did you mean that's what OzBargain is based on or what you're recommending to me?

    • scotty on 16/09/2013 - 20:42

      See this wiki entry. Currently it's around 67k LOC in PHP (including the skeleton of old Drupal) + 28k LOC in Python.

  • Blockey on 15/09/2013 - 16:51
    +1

    WordPress is the most widely used CMS and as such there are a lot of guides on how to use it which may be beneficial for your clients.

    • stickyfingers on 15/09/2013 - 17:18
      +1

      And people are fine paying for someone to setup WP?
      I just thought that people would be like "well, he's just using free software that I could do myself…".

      • Blockey on 15/09/2013 - 20:07

        People pay good money for WordPress theme development.

      • whoopdeedoo on 18/09/2013 - 12:01

        think of it like providing a service. Just like doing someone's taxes

  • josh9787 on 15/09/2013 - 18:42

    wordpress not free if your creating a theme for them. or at least buying a paid theme from someone.
    And if there coming to you for work, than they probably have no idea its free anyways.

    Wordpress only way to go.

    • stickyfingers on 15/09/2013 - 19:27

      So don't use Drupal or Joomla?

      • Car-la-la on 15/09/2013 - 22:58

        joomla is a complete Foul Language. trust me, i started a website using it…. argh!!!

  • Noblejoker on 16/09/2013 - 11:59
    +2

    If someone is payiong you to set something up then they are a newb
    They want something that looks good and works simply for them
    They probably want you to get it hosted and domain registered etc
    Remember they aren't paying you for the tools (WP/Drupal etc is free) they are paying you to do something thaey can't do and to make it simple to manage later on
    As Blockey said there are MANY WP guides available - you can give them one to refer to as a how-to for content updates after you are done

  • VOHAUL on 16/09/2013 - 12:17

    Use CushyCMS. It's great for letting clients edit small parts of their own website. It's also free (and made by Aussies).

    • stickyfingers on 16/09/2013 - 14:37

      Awesome!! Too bad it's not 100% free anymore :P
      I found Wolf CMS & GetSimple and they look quite good and are free :D!

  • dsp26 on 16/09/2013 - 13:10
    +1

    Wordpress maybe free… but getting website load speed and all the other tweaks isn't really that easy for clients who are after a quick way to change content. Plus as mentioned above.. its mostly hosting/domain that most cant do.

    I for one use web24 vps hosting for clients who want a basic website (and using code "104life") gets 10% off the plan… for example.. maximising the $102 a year basic centos/xen vps combo (including discount) shits on hosting with godaddy or paying something like $20 a month for decent hosting.

    The most basic thing on a unix based system and sql (wordpess databases) is to turn swapping off.. ether switch swappiness to 0 or "swapoff -a" and you'll find, even with ecommerce plugins such as woocommerce, your wordpress install will be sweet even with only 512Ram and single cpu guaranteed!

    EDIT
    Also some other things for OP to consider…

    • Focus on minimizing unneccessay costs for client
    • use zPanel instead of cPanel as it is free and fully featured. 99% of people who run a website would never use any of the features in cPanel beyond backups, redirects, etc.
    • Use wordpress and get the client to pick (or suggest) a theme as close to what they want. Leverage your html/css/javascript/php skills to make the necessary customisations <— this is almost always required anyway.
    • Noblejoker on 17/09/2013 - 10:39

      For us newbs can you tell us how to turn of swapping
      What options do you use in Cpanel or whatever?
      Thanks

      • dsp26 on 17/09/2013 - 17:01

        wont be through cpanel unfortunately.. this setting is only available on self managed Linux based servers through root access

        If you are on a managed server… memory shouldn't be an issue for you.

    • scotty on 17/09/2013 - 12:01
      +2

      I wouldn't turn swap off unless your swap partition is on something like SSD which swapping might shorten its life. I'll trust Linux's memory management to put infrequently used memory pages to swap so memory can be freed up for caching. Also in the situation of OOM, without swapping the kernel would be killing random processes.

      • dsp26 on 17/09/2013 - 16:50

        for a normal server.. correct. And I know where your coming from because doing this in windows server will kill the system.

        For wordpress (specifically) no.. especially SQL databases:
        http://openlife.cc/blogs/2011/may/4-performance-fixes-mysql-…
        http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2013/04/19/swap-insanity…

        On a 512Mb RAM server… wordpress will chew through that in a day and start bogging down without any page caching/minify/etc.

        I know this for a fact because i couldnt figure out what was going on at one point and kept having to reboot the server just to get the URLs to load…. the moment the OS uses HDD swap it conks out.

        Now for anyone else that has also used WooCommerce… this plugin alone requires 512Mb of RAM.

        Long story short.. Wordpress is MySQL heavy.

        On a Linux based site server (Ubuntu/centos/etc).. changing to vm.swapiness=0 isn't enough as it doesnt mean to turn it off.. just avoid swapping at all costs. "swapoff -a" to turn off swapping altogether works better and the ram flushes better.

        But in saying that.. i tend to use 1cpu/512Mb ram centos/zpanel combo for basic wordpress and low traffic ecommerce. This combo along with the tweaks was 40,0000x better than being on any of GoDaddys shared hosting which was located in singapore…. i couldn't even build the wordpress site in the backend because it just wouldnt load.. eventually got a pro-rated refund. However.. their domain/dns management is pretty good.

        Ideally though if I could test these guys and get a good ping i'd be happy to move clients to this from Web24 https://www.digitalocean.com/ as it is cheaper than anything here and the SSD probably wouldnt make me worry about swapiness!

        • scotty on 17/09/2013 - 17:02

          No. I am not even talking about Windows. I said I rather let Linux kernel manages the memory as it's something that I understand better (comparing to Windows kernel). Also note that Linux kernel over-commit memory by default so malloc() usually succeed and the kernel would sell the programs more memory than it has. However when the memory is touched but no free physical pages is available — that's where the trouble begins.

          If swap is available — LRU page got swapped out, and reclaimed memory can now be mapped to the program that needs it. If no memory is available, OOM event occurs and kernel would now kill random process.

          The actual process is actually a lot more complicated, but I wouldn't run a Linux server without swap unless I have more than enough memory and the memory footprint is bounded (rather than growing linearly by the number of clients).

  • stickyfingers on 16/09/2013 - 14:38

    What would you guys recommend if the customer wanted to do, lets say, an online shop?

    • dsp26 on 16/09/2013 - 16:34

      Depends on customers budget.

      • I've used Wordpress + WooCommerce for my mrs website because it was free and had all the right plugins (some of which are paid)

      The important bit with ecommerce platforms is compatibility with your clients chosen payment portal and something they have to research or you with them.

      Other things to consider, if its an ecommerce site.. setting up SSL is a pain if you've never done it.

      • Do they already have content ready to go? ie images, slider marketing/artwork, product descriptions? I got ours done through contractors on www.airtasker.com
    • dsp26 on 16/09/2013 - 16:56

      This was a quickie for the mrs www.parasiempre.com.au

      Uses:

      • Web24 hosting - $102 per year
      • Web24 (RapidSSL/GeoTrust SSL) - $30 per year

      • GoDaddy Domain - $15 per year

      • Wordpress (Free)

      • WooCommerce (Free)
      • Maya Shop (Responsive) Theme - USD$49
      • Plugin: All in One SE Pack (Free) <— Important
      • Plugin: Google XML Sitemaps (Free) <— Important
      • Plugin: Order Delivery Date (For WooComemrce) - USD$19
      • Plugin: Use Google Libraries (Free) <— Important for performance if you use google fonts, etc
      • Plugin: W3 Total Cache (Free) <— VERY Important for site performance
      • Plugin: WooCommerce Shipment Tracking - USD$29 <— Had to customise this to add other couriers. Easy if you know the auto URL syntax for the courier company
      • Plugin: WP Slim Stat <— Better than Google Analytics on Wordpress as it captures all traffic and hits

      And a few other plugins that aren't relevant or necessary… at the end of the day it depends on budget.

      • [Deactivated] on 16/09/2013 - 19:45
        +2

        your example website appears to be dead

    • dsp26 on 16/09/2013 - 17:03

      This here:
      http://www.paymentgatewayaustralia.com/

      And what your clients choose is ultimately what you have to base your site/ecommerce combination on as each "Cart" supports different ones.

  • motion2082 on 16/09/2013 - 15:04
    +1

    Have a look at Opencart for online shop

    I have dabbled with Joomla lately, but find it really hard to customized the templates. I like to write my own code and find it quite restrictive with Joomla.

    Have not used Wordpress but I guess the positive is there is a lot of support

  • freakitude on 16/09/2013 - 17:54

    Different cms for different websites. I'd say WordPress works for most general websites but for user powered voting site I'd go with something more specific like pligg cms with custom modifications.

  • zfa on 16/09/2013 - 20:37
    +1

    Remember if you want to set up a WordPress site then you can do so for free on Red Hat OpenShift, I posted about it last week. Here's an example site hosted there that my brother did. This also has CloudFlare (free) in front of it as a cache. Great for free but obviously if you were doing things properly for a business you'd want to go for a hosting provider with proper support channels, SSL support etc. etc. For home use or a personal site this is more than sufficient though.

  • chiefbodge on 17/09/2013 - 00:57

    Wordpress is probably the best CMS around for small business. It has a great community behind it which leads to awesome documentation and lots of plugins.

    I help many companies with their wordpress installs and they pay me a lot of money to do so. Any work you do on wordpress is worth money because otherwise why wouldn't the client do it themselves. The amount it's worth really depends on how much someone is prepared to pay and how experienced you are.

    Although I support some pretty large existing wordpress installs for my corporate customers i tend to use and recommend expression engine. (or codeigniter for non-cms stuff)

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