Be Excellent To Each Other

So I need to redesign this site:

http://www.bfwhospitals.nhs.uk/

Because it's all way out of date and has just got all scruffy with various people having worked on it. I'm not very current with all this as I've been pretty much just been doing SharePoint and other internal stuff for the last few years. However, I'm of a mind to use a CMS of some sort but am unsure of the best option. The site is mostly static content but some of it needs frequent updating and so I'd like to be able to hand this off to the relevant people. I've looked at Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal but to be honest I'm finding it tricky to even get enough working knowledge to get a reliably firm idea about which would be the best option. All of them seem to take a lot of faffing to make them bend to your will, and I've started wondering if it's actually even worth the hassle or if I should just abandon the CMS idea altogether and work with what I've got and redesign it the old-fashioned way. Help.

Drupal is apparently the best one once you get good at it, according to the folk I talk to who deal with this sort of stuff. I used Joomla once and didn't like it. I've got a couple of WordPress websites but they're just for little projects really, I don't know how I'd feel about using it for something important.

Personally I'd do it the old-fashioned way, but that will probably take a little longer.

Joomla: Shit.
Drupal: Less shit, but meh.
WordPress: Good for pretty much anything once you get your head around it. Jem will be along shortly to espouse WordPress' virtues.

Personally, I just use my own CMS.

In short, I've probably not been much help at all.

How's their in-house IT? If they can't patch, don't use a CMS.

It'll be hosted externally. I'm swaying towards Wordpress but there's a few things I can't get my head around, namely how the fuck do you manage a traditional hierarchical structure in the admin pages, it seems like it'll be a living nightmare. Also things which seem like they should be simple turn out to be incredibly difficult until you manage to stumble across the one right answer. e.g. replicating the sort of navigation the site already has with navigation for each section. I found a way to do it but it just seems like the most horrible workaround.

It's this exact issue that I have with most CMSs - and why I designed mine to be more hierarchical.

We've just taken on a Joomla website for a client that was previously using a site on my CMS. They went elsewhere for a new site, but have brought it back to us to manage because what was taking them five minutes at most in my system is taking them up to 45 minutes in Joomla.

(this isn't a sales pitch by the way, my system (obv) isn't open-source or anything so is probably not what you'd be looking for)

Feel free to ask any WP related questions and I can answer.

What is it you're trying to achieve with the navigation?

Cool. Well I'm just trying for an easy way to organise the pages into sections and then for each of the pages within each section to have a menu showing links to the other pages in that section. e.g. like on here:

http://www.bfwhospitals.nhs.uk/departments/radiology/

When I installed Wordpress and started messing around I saw that you could categorise pages and have a hierarchy in there and thought that obviously it would be easy to then use this for navigation but it doesn't seem to be.

OK, so what you'll want to do is set up your Radiology page, then create your child pages ensuring you set the Parent page (drop-down on right hand side) to Radiology. You can then use this plugin to show sibling pages > https://wordpress.org/plugins/list-pages-shortcode/ (other child pages under the same parent)

Jem is the best.

Around!

Nothing's ever gonna keep her down.

I don't like to brag.

Downgraded to second best.

Someone else bragged that they were better.

Brilliant! Thanks, I shall investigate later.

Me.

You can usually find a plugin to make Wordpress do what you want whether on the admin or public side. Sometimes there are few that do similar things. Some work, some don't so there can be a bit of trial and error involved. I've always found Wordpress easy to bend. As opposed to Joomla that felt like I was was banging my head repeatedly against a very hard wall.

I finally redid our site using wordpress in the end and the result is here:

http://www.bfwh.nhs.uk/

I went out to our patient panel and got a load of feedback from there about what they hated about the old site, also by looking at the analytics to see what are the main things people actually look for from a site. I stood my ground with various people to get rid of as much of the corporate crap which nobody ever looks at or at least shove it down to the bottom.

Anyway any comments or suggestions on design or speed or how to improve it would be most welcome.

Not noticing that this was an old thread being bumped I started at the beginning, clicked through to the site in question and wondered what the hell you were complaining about as it looked just fine.

When are you porting it to gov.uk as per the guidelines

I'd be happy to but I don't see it happening any time soon with this idiotic internal market idea they've got going on. Do any NHS Trusts use it instead of having their own site? I notice even NHS England maintain a separate site.

I think a few do, but i'm not involved in all of that anymore so can't easily check. They are all supposed to, but you know how it is in governmental IT

Keep it updated!

I think it's excellent. The important information is very easy to find, there's an economy of copy not typical of lots of public websites (councils, I'm looking at you). And it looks attractive. I just compared it with my local hospital's site, and yours shits all over mine.

I also like the way the photos zoom. It makes the 'Patients welcome new healthcare service' chaps look like they're looming at me.

Is Wendy Swift, Gibbies drag alter-ego?

Looks good on my mobile mate.

(but the same applies to any CMS)


Good work dude - nice and simple to navigate, well presented