Review of my *new* consulting site

Folks:

Thanks for taking a look at:
http://gui.geekuprising.com

This is going to be the next version of:
http://www.geekuprising.com

Let me know what you think about colors, functionality, features, etc. keeping in mind that a gorgeous design isn't necessarily what I'm going for- I'm a programmer, not a designer.

Minor grammatical nitpicking here:
In this page, you have


IMHO this should read

F. Thanks!

I should've mentioned that this is still only 50% done, presentation-wise and a little closer on content.

just some comments on the code,
html4 doesn't allow meta and link tags to be closed ie. <link .... /> should be <link ..... >

you got lots of <li class="syndicatedContent">
but no containing <ul> or <ol> tag.


another list you got doens't close the li tags, which is allowed in html4 but should be avoided, and its better to be consistent on how you code.

Hmm. . . I'll take a look at unbalanced tags. This is mostly handled by my CMS I'm using (WebGUI, at http://www.plainblack.com ) and some of the templates have unclosed tags.

BTW- WebGUI is *the best* CMS I've seen in terms of flexibility and intuitiveness yet.

I looked up that cms site,
and by a quick look over some of the sites that uses this cms, i'm not impressed by it codewise,
lots of fundamental faults,
as they was repeated on all site, it have to be within the plainblack core,

one should avoid using system that spreads missuse and use of corrupted code.

of some of the cms i've used, i've been pretty impressed by eZ publish

I am going to have to say that I do like http://gui.geekuprising.com better. But the new version is pretty cool too.

What specifically do you have issues with? I can tell you whether or not it's in the core. A lot of the example sites are ugly, but the system is so trivially templatted that it doesn't have to be that way at all.

BTW, I've evaluated A LOT of different CMS's- Zope/Plone, PHPNuke (barf. . .) and a few other PHP systems, Bricolage, even some of the commerical ones like TeamSite.

all the sites i checked had the same errors in the code, sites linked from the plainblack homepage.
the same errors was on the plainblack site, so it has to be the cms that makes these.

for example they are mixing xhtml and html syntax, not good.
lacking several mandatory attributes.
there is also other issues that could have been avoided, like how they use the css. use of internal css instead of external css

i for one wouldn't use a system that generates that bad code per default.

I'm sorry, when you said "code" I thought you meant actual programming code, and not HTML. HTML isn't code. It's just a markup language.

WebGUI completely separates code from presentation.

Everything is configurable, and the system is such that you can completely throw out the default templates without touching a bit of code and without leaving the web interface. Default templates in every CMS are pretty much worthless- who wants a site that looks like everyone else?

None your issues is default, and they specifically tell you to use external CSS all over the place in the installation documents.

The mixed XHTML/HTML syntax is only for META tags. The system is DTD aware, but this needs to be extended to the META tags as well. This is pretty minor.

So your only real issue is that the default templates, and some of the users, create pages that don't validate? That is a very, very tiny piece of what WebGUI does.

Until you've seen the management tools, you aren't qualified to make a judgement, and if you apply the "doesn't validate" litmus to web pages, you're going to fail nearly everywhere.

i'm just saying it doens't look very proffesional
when they use faulty code/markup in the default templates. (since all the sites had the same basic errors i assume its the default template)

there is aslo closed link, br-tags.
and empty <p /> tags ( which isn't xhml)

OK. Default templates suck anyways.

It's no reason to discard a system, unless that system can't give you anything but default templates without dropping into the code.

The design looks pretty good. It's simple and elegant, yet lends toward good navigation.