Nadia and I have been discussing the quick deployment of an attractive digital “store front” for the inevitable Edgeryders Company site whose goal it is to connect Edgeryders service providers and clients with jobs that might span everything from Accounting services to Web Design. Of course we could design the front end for our own website, but why reinvent the wheel? Most of these themes cost around $25 and with a little substitution of the images and customization of the color scheme, and a fitting of the logo – voila – we’d have a very beautiful wrapper within no time at all.
Below are some examples of mostly HTML5 templates I picked out of a huge pool. My hope is to get some feedback from the community about them. Feel free to suggest other themes or other methods of arriing to a more polished image that could demonstrate our teams, our services like a slick, dynamic brochure or portfolio of sorts. Keep in mind that the site would be interoperative with our current database, but attempts to create a very clear distinction between Edgeryders the community and Edgeryders the Company.
Please leave a comment if any of these designs speak out to you. Keep in mind that because all of these templates allow us to easily swap out imagery and color schemes for our own custom needs, that its best if you pay notice to the layout and functionalities that each template offers.
Also, feel free to suggest a theme in Wordpress or HTML5 that might be aesthetically suitable to the Edgeryders Company website.
[saidhamideh], thanks for this. These are all very sleek and professional. I personally like Sentinel and Galeria best.
Do you have any idea as to how a separate corporate website would be made sustainable? [Matthias] is skeptical of it, because:
it means one more installation and maintenance tasks. He points out that many tech projects run into "death by entropy" as they become unwieldy and require lots of time and effort to maintain.
On top of the technical issues, there are content issues: websites need to stay up-to-date, with fresh content, deleting spam comments if comments are open etc. However sleek the design, if your last post was three months ago your website is going to communicate abandonment and desolation.
Finally, there are SEO considerations. If all links point to the same website, we get better treatment by search engines.
Whatever its aesthetical issues, the Edgeryders community website is not an abandoned one. It has fresh content and new users every day, and it has been so for more than two years. Rolling the corporate website from within the community site has the advantage that you get both technical maintenance and content updating for free. You (and others who are more familiar with the rules of commercial communication) seem to think whatever we do with Drupal Commons is going to be subpar. So, I guess, there is no win-win solution: we either take the simple path (clean up the code of this and keep everything on the same website) or the aestherically pleasing one (we run two separate installations).
So, my question: what is the absolute simplest version of the aesthetically pleasing path? For example:
no corporate blog, only static pages – how many, at a minimum?
comments closed – no spam to delete
At this point, we need to estimate money and time costs of the operation and decide whether to take them on or not. What do you think?
[saidhamideh] thanks for taking the time to select these templates!
I’m no expert in this stuff so most of it seems ok to me. INSPiRING is one that I see Edgeryders information fitted into. It’s clear, simple and easy to navigate (in a scroll down without lateral pointers & opening up other pages and then returning)
Someone made a point somewhere as an input for how the company website should look like saying that it currently could speak to employees of private organisations, but not so much to public institutions. So the simpler it is the better imho. For reference, a website built for both innovators and governments is http://wearefuturegov.com/ and I find it smashing (no idea what the theme is though)
I would go for simplicity too Noemi. Nevertheless it’s always a good idea to be able to pull a good card in the right moment. It seems to me that Sentinel has some cool stuff in the Features menu that could prove useful fpr ER in the future. I also like Galeria.
O am unable to access the FutureGov website that you have suggested Noemi
(no idea what the theme is though)