Site design question

Classic General
1

Seeking some ideas as to how to build a site for a friends small business (classic car restoration and sales)

The site will need to be based on a CMS as they will be maintaining the content and I’ve used Armadillo, Easy CMS and Poster in the past for different things.

At any one time they will have a handful of cars for sale so will require text, lots of imagery and possibly video. I could set this up using the blog functionality but that will either give them complete freedom as to how they display the content (e.g. Armadillo with drag and drop) or give them a template into which they can add content (I think Total CMS blog works that way looking at @joeworkman Soccer Demo - but I haven’t used it). They can add/delete cars by simply doing a new entry or deleting an old one. This might work but I’m not sure how structured that lets me be with the actual page layout for a ‘car for sale’ page (if someone has used Total CMS they might be able to tell me how structured it is possible to build a blog page).

An alternative approach would be to say build 9 ‘car for sale’ pages, all with the same template, all fed from (say) a 3x3 grid on a main page which can be updated via a CMS. However, 2 questions leap to mind. Is there functionality accessible through one of the CMS to turn the visibility of that page on or off (and obviously on the main grid) so that my friend can do it?

Even if that is possible, I still have the problem of (say) having sold car 1, turn that block (and page) off and I just then have a blank space on the page where that was and from an aesthetics point of view they’d have to move content from (say) the last block to the first to make it look ok. Taking a blog approach obviously avoids this sort of problem.

Sorry, a bit of a ramble, its really the old age problem that no CMS lets you add a new page and I’m just trying to come up with something that looks like it does that (whilst obviously not)

Just to be clear, the site is non transactional and given these are expensive purchases, the quality of content / site experience matters so using ecommerce product page functionality probably won’t give the required experience.

Anyone got some thoughts or examples on this sort of thing ?

Cheers

Dave

2

It sounds to me like Total CMS is almost certainly your best bet. There’s lots of flexibility in how you build out the blog post template (or in your case, the ‘car for sale’ page template). You can build out a full page and only have small parts of it controlled by the Total CMS blog part, so you have lots of control over structure. And once that is set up, it’s super easy for you or your client to add a new entry, complete with gallery, video options, etc.

Total CMS has a 30-day trial and there’s a recent “start a blog in 30 minutes” on Joe’s youtube page.

1 Like
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I have seen many people build sites exactly like this with Total CMS blog. Many people think outside of the box and realized that blog could be used for so much more.

When building a site with Total CMS blog, you need to shift your thinking of how we use RapidWeaver. It’s no longer our website builder. It’s a template builder for the pages/content/posts that we create with Total CMS online.

If you peruse over on Weaver’s Space, there are probably good example of users using Total CMS in similar situations.

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Thanks @jabostick - the example is near enough what I need to do.

Cheers

Dave

5

Thanks Joe - I’ll dig into all your resources on Total CMS and get learning. @joeworkman quick question on licensing - new site will be hosted elsewhere and the old site will be left on place until the new one is finished. I know there is a 30 day demo but I’ll want to build the site on a sandbox domain and once we’re all happy, move it to the real domain. Is it possible to move the licence to the new domain just before we go live ?

Thanks for all your help and your great stacks.

Dave

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I would be happy to do that. Or you could simply create a subdomain of the final domain. Then we don’t need to move the license since test subdomains are included in the license.

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Thanks Joe - helpful as ever!

Dave

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