A New Website For TrackTime
original by lancejohnson on flickr
After much work and umm-ing and ahh-ing I've built new sites for the main NimbleWorks products. This should make it easier to discover and find these applications.
TrackTime
TrackTime my time logging software for creative Mac professionals has moved to gettracktime.com its looking rather good over there and has a nice easy to remember URL.
Nimble ToDo
Nimble ToDo my iOS to do list software now lives at it originaly intended home - nimbletodo.com again another big visual step up.
Why the sites? How are they built?
Both of these sites use commercial templates that were purchased for a relitively small ammount of money. How ever I have them both running on different platforms. I wanted to try a little A/B testing with the two platforms, first nimbletodo.com is running on what seems now to be the industry standard Wordpress. gettracktime.com is running on my CMS of choice MODx, and my experience of developing the two is rather different.
Firstly I consider myself to be a dab hand at MODx using it everyday for the past 18 months or so in my PHP contracting work and as such I have a small repetoire of usefull snippets and code that I can call on to make MODx do some very clever things. On the TrackTime website the most notable bit of code that I use is on the fly thumbnail cache generation for all the screenshots. If I was to use word press I would have to generate thumbnails manualy for all the images. Next up is the ease of integrating Googles A/B testing into MODx - it takes 5 minutes to set up the system and be running, this is a BIG bonus if you want to do any sort of split testing / optimisation.
Caching MODx comes with some great caching out of the box it really does I have no worries about it being overloaded, the caching also has a benefit of making page load times fast. Both sites use lots of small graphical elements that slow page times up so there are improvements there.
Nimble ToDo took me one hour to set up over coffee on a saturday morning, the TrackTime site took 2 weeks of on and off work, but would have take 2 days of full time commitment. So TrackTime took a larget upfront investment, but it is a considrably more extensive site. I had to create 3 templates from the sample HTML that I had purchased, but there are still a few tweaks to make. Nimble ToDo I'm a little disappionted in to be honest, the Wordpress template that I purchased is shockingly bad. I'm going to have to go back and hack the code quite extensively to get any sort of SEO performace out of it.
And there we go, I have mentioned SEO, at the moment MODx gives very fine levels of control over the SEO performance of every single page, incuding internal redirects and 301 permanent redirects if I want. I get to control meta tags per page, sitemap priorities, rel_nofollow in any page, no index, etc etc. Wordpress comes with some good SEO plugins but I'm not sure that they give you such a fine level of control over ever page.
Ultimately SEO performance depends on the work that you put into it, making sure titles are set, identifing longtail keywords, meta tags correctly filled out. Currently neither site has all that completed, so the comparison is a moot point.
I'm going to be interested to see how well the two sites perfom, Wordpress as always was stupidly easy to setup and get running, hence its popularity, but I find it quite frustrating as every plugin adds unnecessary weight to the pages and getting a site 'just so' requires hacking horibble mish-mashes of php and html. MODx on the otherhand does require a steep learning curve, quite a bit of up front investment to get the site off the ground, but offers a much cleaner way to operate. PHP and HTML are seperated, templates are very very clean, and adding extras like A/B testing for conversions or optimisation is a breeze.
I prefer MODx as a system and fully expect gettracktime.com to out perform nimbletodo.com but its the home of a higher value asset so more time will probably be invested into it.
Contradictions, thoughts and comments are willingly accepted below
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Reply #1 on : Wed February 08, 2012, 09:58:26