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I received a query today from my ex-Boss and a long-time friend,

How much does it cost to design and build a web site for a small company these days? I assume it depends on size of the site and complexity. I am thinking a small "regular" site. no database. no shopping basket. What is a good budget to start with?

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Everyone and their dog talks about WordPress performance these days and also tells you how to scale WordPress (Read: How to really scale WordPress). When I grew up in Kharagpur (yes, the same Kharagpur which has the top IIT and yes I did my B.Tech there) everyone knew how to cure diabetes - you have to walk a lot, stop eating sweets, eat / drink varying concoction of Neem leaves and / or Nayantara leaves and / or Jamun fruit or seed and presto you are cured of diabetes. It works to some extent in uncomplicated cases and so does the various remedies for WordPress performance. Let's see what are the often repeated "expert" advice for making WordPress perform (because by default WordPress performance is really really crappy; pardon my French):

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MODx is an open source PHP Application Framework with powerful features that help you take control of your online content. It empowers developers and advanced users to give as much control as desired to whomever they desire for day-to-day website content maintenance chores. For example, it gives you a true system for registered web users and groups that is separate from administration users. You can grant some web users access to one page and others access to another page. For content management, you can easily duplicate documents, folders (and all their children!), chunks and snippets. Most significant, though, is MODx's ability to empower you to quickly and easily create and maintain a rich and dynamic website like never before. MODx is something which hasn't actually got its full share of cake ever. So as the new version of MODx 0.9.6.3 came out on Dec 19. 2008. I thought of reviewing the new version and then explain it to you all.

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How effective is a site re-design? The final proof is in site traffic. When we started re-designing Taragana.com we had many apprehensions. One thing we knew for sure, the corporate site we had then sucked in three major ways:

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Our website ( taragana.com ) needs to continuously adapt to our growing business. The old website was based on Joomla CMS, which despite its strength, was pretty hard to easily customize for our complex needs. We needed a solution to enable us to easily create microsites for our products with distinctive look, embed functionality with PHP snippets etc. After extensive research and prototyping we adopted MODx (review).

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I have been an avid user of Mambo and now Joomla since 2001. taragana.com is designed using Joomla. Unfortunately we haven't been able to maintain the site very well, our fault not Joomla's.

I wanted to re-design the site to highlight our products and service, and to cope up with our plan for several micro-site development in 2008 in addition to delivering a nice look. Let's look at my 5 simple requirements for CMS:
1. We should be able to easily embed custom code (php) to embed widgets (or snippets as Modx likes to call them) in certain pages.
2. We should be able to easily modify the pages, preferably from the page itself (think AJAX editing).
3. Ability to create micro-sites which differ structurally and functionally from main sites
4. Flexible hierarchy and menus
5. Automate Sitemap (Google & regular) & RSS feed generation, nice permalinks & SEO optimized URL
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