neurotwitch

famous artists school site launched

We finally soft-launched the Famous Artists School website redesign! We’ve been working on it for months. We still have to add in the emagazine and some additional sample lessons, examples, and resources. I’m particularly looking forward to getting the emagazine up.

The site is almost entirely driven by ExpressionEngine from pMachine. The shopping cart is done with ZenCart, which was fairly easy to customize once we figured out where everything is. ZenCart is almost perfect—and definitely a far, far better shopping cart than many we looked at. We had to change the cart FAS had been using because it just couldn’t handle the myriad shipping options, which depend on both zones and weight. Gotta say, it sure makes it easy for clients to manage their own stores, which is above and beyond what most carts offer. Awfully good software for just a donation.

We decided to do the site with ExpressionEngine because we wanted staff to be able to change the content on the site without having to dive into the html. The one thing that would have made it even nicer would have been a way to automatically have the navigation display “here” depending upon the entry—maybe down the road. Then we could have dispensed with having to use a different template for each page. This setup, though, will save us hours and hours of maintenance work. Oh wait, maybe that’s not such a good thing ...

What we particularly liked about doing this site, besides really liking the people who own the company, Cortina Learning, is that the products are great. It’s hard to find good home study art courses that offer everything you need at affordable prices—I think these products achieve that. And there are a couple of new ones dealing with bleeding edge topics in the works—I’m really looking forward to seeing those.

A site launch is a good end to this long, strange week. I have to get some screenshots so I can add them to the InfoPulse portfolio.

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