I had the pleasure of working with Alice Sundstrom over the past few months to develop and deploy a site for her firm. As principle of Sundstrom Marketing Design, Alice wanted a site which featured her companies commitment to marketing communications for higher education. Sundstrom Marketing Design offers three central services for it’s clients: strategic planning, project management, and design services.

The largest section of the site is the portfolio section which features many pieces of work honored by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE). Innovative, professional, clean and effective would be words I would use to describe many of the pieces in the portfolio section.

Specializing in marketing communication efforts for institutions of higher education, Sundstrom Marketing Design is very well positioned to help colleges and universities engage students, propects, and potential donors. Alice’s experience at the University of Oregon and her background in fine arts really makes her an excellent resource for many departments and university marketing offices seeking to solidify their brand and meet their marketing goals.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been busy with - among other things - launching my very first website built with the powerful content management application Expression Engine. The site - Living Hope Church - is a fully functional site, providing the client with full access to all of the content on the site, the ability to upload images, blog posts, add pages to site sections, calendar events, and even a podcast. Expression Engine’s architecture makes it flexible to provide a user-intuitive experience on the back-end, easily providing markers for separate content areas.

From a programming perspective, EE is much easier to code than Wordpress, which requires you to code natively in php. That said, the learning curve for EE was pretty high, although no more than Wordpress. The upside is that the EE forums are par excellence and I was able to get quick information from the EE community.

The capabilities of the CMS make creating multiple content types, relationships, filters and more very easy. The ability to use mulitple “weblogs” - that is, database tables to store information - and to be able to add custom fields and categories to each, means that the publish page if fully customizable to the needs of the content, not the other way around. This for me, is a huge asset. Before, while using Wordpress, I was forced to bend content around the entry areas. Not so with EE.

That said, I’m not all rosey about EE. My major beef with it so far has to do with typography and the publish area. For client needs, unless they will simply be entering plain text, the textarea for data inputs provide no provision for the client to easily manipulate markup without using HTML tags, which provides for some pretty messy data entry areas, especially when creating unordered lists. Out of the box EE’s only option for clients is to learn bits and pieces of HTML, which in my world of clients isn’t a very good option.

There are extension options. However, the WYSIWYG extensions produce awful code and if a client copies and pastes from Word, they often ruin any consistency in design you might have pined for. I did find an extension which installs Markitup, an excellent jquery plugin which lets you use textile markup, making the process of marking up the content much easier. That said, it’s still a bit buggy and I can’t get it to work on another site I’m building in EE. Ugh.

All in all, I’m sold. At $99 for a non-commercial/personal/non-profit license and $249 for a commercial license it’s a no brainer for its ease of use and customization. As I look onto much more complex jobs, EE astounds me at its ability to perform. As a one-man-design-shop, I find it a very helpful tool in my arsenal.

If you’re interested in learning more about Expression Engine, I would suggest heading over to Michael Boyink’s site Train-EE. He provides some great tutorials for free and some nice screencasts and e-books for purchase.

Today, I was browsing some of the fine sites included on the CSS Mania site and came across a design site, in which the owner states that the three “ingredients for a spectacular web site” are: (1) beautiful design, (2) rock solid markup, and (3) attention to the details. While I agree that all of these are important to the design process, I disagree with the author (and the design strategy) and contend that the most important ingredient for a spectacular web site is great content! As a designer, I am constantly running into the challenge of creating pieces that have more effectiveness than simply “looking pretty.” Message, tone, intention, target audience are all affected by the content (as content is often affected by all of these things as well).

No matter how much we, as designers, want to get paid for our skills, if there is no message or content, there really can’t be a website. The web, while evolving, is still a content-driven medium. I’ve recently been reading Kelly Goto and Emily Cotler’s excellent Web Design 2.0: Workflow that Works and it suggests a workflow that actually begins with content generation. While so unintuitive to the designer, I believe that Goto and Cotler are 100% correct in their placement of content at the beginning of the design process. Content mediates all that we do in the design process, and is the starting point, rather than ending point of our work as designers. Content drives traffic, be it on commerce sites or personal blogs. Blogs which don’t say anything (or anything new, as is the unfortunate case of this blog) could be beautifully designed, executed with technical perfection, and focus on every aesthetic detail, yet still end up with no visitors.

What I’ve found lately is that clients, and users, care more about content than they do about XHTML and CSS. I know that personally, I’ve become a web-standards activist with my clients, advocating the necessity for standards compliance (accessibility, portability, browser compatibility, et al). But I’ve also become a content activist with my clients, guiding them through the complexity of finding their voice, describing their product in ways that are meaningful, and developing a message that is focused on what their customers want and need to hear.