This site has been decommissioned and is no longer online.

This site was originally hard-coded with HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript. Initially, I added Couch solely as a blogging engine to manage the market's newsletter. But this winter with the introduction of on-page editing, I went ahead and converted the majority of the site to Couch management. Content is managed mainly through on-page editing, with only a couple of clonable templates exposed to the user in the admin panel. It makes for a very clean admin panel and quick and easy editing.

Not counting the newsletter (which is sent to subscribers using Mailchimp's RSS to email feature) and some supporting pages like the 404, rss and sitemap, this is a single page site. I rely on a number of UI elements like overlays, tooltips, and tabbed navigation to make all of the content easily accessible from the index page. Plus, the jQuery bling helps to make the content more fun and engaging. A Mennonite man told me that the site was "very user-friendly," which I take to be a pretty good usability endorsement.

The interactive UI is probably the most distinctive aspect of the site, so go ahead and click and hover around on the page to see how it helps to make a variety of features and content accessible to the user while avoiding clutter.

What first drew me to Couch is that I can use as much or as little of it as I want. It doesn't interfere where I don't need it and it doesn't dictate how my site is designed or coded. With more experience, I've come to appreciate and use more of the power and flexibility of CouchCMS: programming conditional statements, managing repeating and reusable data, and access to all of the Couch variables, not to mention the more advanced addons and specialized capabilities. But still, none of it conflicts with any of my original code or other third party tools.

Thanks,
Tim

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