CSS, CMS, and Hosting

Css errors, .NET errors, difficult hosting

[zbeauvais]

Hello:
I am managing a corporate website and am having a few issues with the hosts. One issue is that, when selecting text in IE, most of the page is highlighted without the option of only selecting the text one wants. In FireFox, this isn't an issue for the same site. Our hosts reckon they need to insert <div> tags at every line and want to charge us for the pleasure. They host and maintain the site, though they haven't really provided a working site in many respects. Is this <div> set-up necessary, or is it something too inelegant?

Also, the hosts have provided us with a clumsy back-end pagebuilder when what we want is a simple, elegant, CMS (like the WordPress or Joomla dashboards) which will not alter the site every time the site is updated. We do not wish to host it ourselves, and would rather the company provided us with a good CMS, any ideas? also, any price ideas -- seeing that many good CMS's are Open Source?

Thanks for the answers in advance,
-Zach

[Setek]

*rolls on the floor laughing*

Empty div tags in between every line?! Imagine the code bloat... not to mention the fact that it probably won't fix the problem :)

Welcome to Webmaster World by the way :)

I've experienced the odd selection in IE, my encounters were always connected to a style of coding that can be described as "odd" and "messy". Usually when a lot of the page has differing IE-only hacks, along with a lot of relative positioning for no real reason but to get IE 6 to display without guillotining most of the content.

To be honest, I'd be more inclined to say this:

1. Get away from .NET, and your current hosters, they sound like they are more interested in charging an arm and a leg for a "solution" that probably won't solve anything;
   
2. Recode your entire website. While costing a lot more initially, if you can manage to have it recoded in a much neater and less problematic fashion, you will avoid problems such as those; and
   
3. WordPress is quite decent for blog-styled websites, and if that's the style of website you want then that's cool, though you should understand that pretty much no CMS will give you good, neat code, because the only way to accomplish that is to hard code everything.

But... that's if I was faced with those problems.

[zbeauvais]

The problem we (and, I imagine any company) face is that we do not have a coder on staff. The website is for new media marketing, and my position (in charge of the site) is as a marketer. What that means in practice is that the content is written by us and published on the site. There needs more functionality than a simple blog, but I was considering a blog in the main template of the site as its home page, with the navigation bars etc... pointing to the rest of the site's functions (faq, about us, and our emerchant stuff). The reason is that blogs allow the articles to be written non-technically and published simply. They also increase searchability and allow permalinks. A lot of companies use blogs on the side (i.e. directed from the default site to a blog.html) but I want the main site (which holds news articles only) to BE a blog. Is this a good idea?

At the moment, the code from the PageBuilder is very bloated...

recoding is NOT an option,

[cmarshall]

What I would suggest doing is setting up another site alongside the one you are using. Use a different host, set up WordPress, hire a different geek to code it, etc.

One thing the implosion of the Bubble did was spew out thousands of talented, hungry Web coders. You should probably be able to get someone to do it for a reasonable cost.

What I did for our software development infrastructure was grab an off-the-shelf wiki system, gut it and customize it for our internal purposes. In fact, I am working on it right now in another window. I rewrote the security structure, AJAXified it and I'm throwing in all kinds of links to our other subsystems like the VCS and the ITS.

You may want to consider a wiki system like MediaWiki, although wikis are more project tools than presentation mechanisms.

[zbeauvais]

Ah, but would this allow the congruency between the sites? It has to look like one site... also, if there's a different host, the DNS will be complicated or impossible. I don't want anyone on a different domain in case they navigate by searchbar.

I use a blogger blog as a website for a charity project I do, and the blog IS the site. I have modified the templates so that certain links appear which allow specific posts to act like individual pages (welcome, values, projects etc...)

I have noticed some blogs on major (especially media-based) sites like news companies' whose blog is integrated into the overall site scheme. oh well, I may be asking too much: A Blog in a site with a CMS that WORKS...
thanks,
-Z

[cmarshall]

You can usually get a zillion plugins for any CMS.

The trick is generally to TAKE STUFF OUT that you don't need.

Too many CMS-based sites tend to leave in all the extra crap (like ephemerids, who's logged in and calendars) that mean nada to most users.

Learn to use

display:none

ruthlessly.

You are correct about the need for contiguity, but you are asking for a lot, and you won't get a simple solution. In my personal site, I shoehorned a WordPress blog and a Gallery 2 gallery into my main site quite seamlessly without hacking them (I was able to use their built-in skinning support).