MixAction Website Goes Tentatively Live
15 09 2008If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Just a brief post from me tonight. I’m a tad sleepy due to working almost around the clock and I’m about to stream last nights episode of Doctor Who down from the ABC (Australian equivalent of the BBC). 
Some news on the MixAction project. The website, first draft, went live this afternoon.
It’s not the final draft and it’s not the final look. I have heaps of things to do yet and the theme UI will change without question (I have something specific in mind with the look and feel as developed for me by Alta Webworks some months back - but I’m a slow coach when it comes to PHP and CSS hacking).
I actually debated not announcing this here after the rather crude responses I received back in June in respect of early screenshots of MixAction. While that particular idiot has been banned from commenting the world is full of such folks. So please, do comment but keep it civil. Constructive critiques are welcomed.
I made a decision a month ago to do something very different, at least for me at any rate. I love Joomla but it’s over kill for a single product website. So I elected to turn WordPress into a CMS. No - I’m not drunk!!
It’s actually quite easy to do. There are a plethora of plugin’s to assist in all manner of things and for a single product site, that includes content articles that are updated regularly it makes some sense I think. For example the Tips and Tricks section on the site is actually article driven where the other pages are static WordPress “pages”.
I only started using WordPress here on this blog in March this year (2008) and I’ve got a confession to make - I’ve become a WordPress plugin addict.
Content editing has been done using Windows Live editor (desktop based) which makes doing content very quick and slick.
The side-bars are all plugin’s gleaned from a variety of sources for WordPress giving an incredible variety of options. I’m going to go into detail on some of that stuff in the future here, so for those of you interested you might like to follow along in the coming weeks and months, on turning WordPress into a CMS and how I’m finding the process.
So by all means feel free to take a look and comment here if you wish to do so. The URL is http://www.mixaction.com
The idea is to get the content to support the product out early before product release. Thus a passable site design rather than the finished product as the CMS content requires no rewrite when a theme changes - though experience has proven minor layout changes often have to be made.
The first “article” is up on the Tips and Hints page there and the first blog post for the MixAction blog - which is actually a separate installation of WordPress as I wanted that to run in a similar manner to this one in order to take advantage of out of the box blog features WordPress offers by default.
Google and Yahoo crawled the site “officially” for the first time around a minute after I made it “live” (previously it had an offline page there - also a WordPress plugin). Though to be fair they have been dropping by for some months.
I’ll be blogging here about what I do article wise over the coming months in respect of how this affects indexing on the search engines. Naturally being indexed and getting visits are not necessarily entwined…
This post may give you the impression I’m about to go live with the actual MixAction product. That’s not the intent here and I’m not implying that at all. I’m still coding and working on that and I won’t announce a release date until the last minute, as it were, for various reasons.
That doesn’t mean you won’t be kept appraised of development though…
The principle idea of pumping out content on the main site and getting the blog rolling is business development as opposed to product development. If you read this bog often you will be aware that I consider the two entirely different things - they feed each other to be sure - but have different goals and indeed outcomes.
That’s it for tonight. Thanks for reading!
Scott Kane
Quote of the day:
I have a rock garden. Last week three of them died. - Richard Diran
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Looks good. FYI - guarantee icon seems like it was antialiased on black and you have a typo “Mixing Live Audio With CD Players Is To Risky.” –> Too. Also “30 Days Satisfaction Or Money Back” means (IMHO) that I’m guaranteed only to get 30 days of satisfaction, no more or less
Could we pay extra for more satisfaction, please?
Good luck!
Hi Richard,
Thanks for commenting!
My wife has (teacher) has promised a complete going over for the “to/too” etc issues, and grammar, she’s just a tad busy last few days. But I really appreciate you pointing these out - so easy to make these errors and so bad if teachers are going over the site.
Regarding extra for more satisfaction - how much extra?
Seriously, fair point. I’ll look at re-phrasing.
Thanks very much for taking the time.