This weekend I finally admitted that moving The Australian Politics Resource to a Joomla format was a bad idea.
Don't get me wrong, Joomla is a great content management system. I still promote it heavily for my schools. Unfortunately however, it didn't make the grade for search engine optimisation. The APR site never did get listed on Google while in the Joomla format. Joomla brings immense power to people without web programming skills. It will be difficult to replicate what Joomla did out of the box, but search engine visibility had become a major issue.
This weekend I commenced the migration of APR back to plain HTML.
When I say plain, I don't mean I took it back to the HTML of 1995. Impressive as it was back then, no-one would take such a site seriously today.
APR employs cascading style sheets to set a standard layout for each of its pages, and under the hood PHP scripting allows sitewide updates of menu and "breaking news" elements.
What next? Perhaps a bit of the dynamic database driven magic the APR became known for in 2000. Who knows, maybe even a bit of SOAP or AJAX. That will take a bit of work though. So APR continues to be a work in progress.
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