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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MODx is an excellent AJAX enabled content management system, which is leagues ahead of Joomla / Mambo. One of the features of MODx is that pages aren’t fully deleted. They are marked as deleted (displayed as strike-through items) and they are not displayed on the web. However they still remain in the database. This is a great feature to prevent accidental deletion. However sometimes you really need to delete pages to reduce the clutter and prevent conflicting aliases. Here is how you can truly (and irrevocably) delete pages from the database.

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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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