Marqui – A hosted proprietary system, which wasn’t terrible, but definitely was not worth the money and developing for it seemed to be a pain. I averaged 10 calls a month from two sites that had been live for years.

CMS/MS – An open source solution that served the purpose of a basic CMS with the best price around (FREE!). The only problem was that it was difficult to use from an Admin perspective, and was not as flexible for developers to be a truly powerful CMS.

Contribute – A trimmed down version of Dreamweaver by Adobe sold on Amazon and came in a real box. I won’t go into those forgotten nightmares too deeply, but let’s just say the software in the box had about as much value as an old AOL CD. The amount of time wasted trying to get this software to function as it was billed to could have been used to go to Mars by now.

Having had clients on all of these systems made me completely hate CMS systems. I spent so much time troubleshooting and tech supporting these systems that I grew jaded toward all CMS systems in general. The complaints were always the same: “This doesn’t do what I want it to do” (which was an issue of power) or “This is really hard to use and not user friendly” (an issue of usability). During this time, however, I was lucky enough to work on a few blogs for my client using an established open source blogging engine called WordPress. WordPress was still in its infancy but I was amazed at the Admin interface. Not only was it a dream to use for me, but my less tech savvy clients even found it simple. The best part of course was I hardly ever received calls on how to use it or how it was working as I had anticipated based on past experiences. Little did I know, several years later, that my blog crush would evolve into something much bigger.

Here at eROI, we considered using Wordpress as a full CMS in the summer of 2007. We realized that it satisfied the usability requirement but the developers felt that it was lacking power and flexibility to feel comfortable building a full site on it. We started dating WordPress slowly, getting familiar with it by building smaller brochure sites that didn’t have a lot of pages, content or functionality. (Keep in mind that at this point in time, the development community was rumoring about WordPress being able to handle full CMS responsibilities, whereas open source applications like Drupal and Joomla were being triumphed as truly having the power to handle bigger sites.)

Again, I was blessed and cursed with having clients whose sites were built using these CMS systems. I will agree that they blew the doors off the ones listed above (built sans-CMS), but to be honest I still found them clunky and hard to use.

While Drupal was hailed from developers as the next best thing, I found the Admin interface very confusing, and I could only imagine what my less tech savvy clients would say since even I found it convoluted. Would my Mom (best user case ever!) know what the hell a block was supposed to be?

The second contender, Joomla, had a “slick” Admin interface with colorful menus and cute little icons (and I actually found the system to be somewhat intuitive) but the distaste I saw from the developers who had to make functional changes with it or try and hack plugins made me realize that the universe didn’t need another not-so-powerful, hard-to-use CMS.

By the end of 2007 I had finished our first ecom integrated, decently sized WordPress site for a client who was not web savvy. With a few little bumps in the road the site was off and running with barely a peep from the client as the months passed. I remember seeing the gazes of developers at other agencies looking at the site because they couldn’t believe this site was completely built using WordPress. I knew in that moment this was something beyond a mere crush.

No one could really anticipate that WordPress would grow exponentially in 2008 due to a thriving community. The community began creating plugin after plugin, adding more features and functionality, propelling this simple blogging engine to something much greater than a CMS. In 2008, we at eROI began making full media campaign sites for global brands, 100+ page sites, and even a contesting engine from a hacked form plugin. We soon learned that by hacking or making or own custom plugins we could do anything for anybody.

Finally, we had a CMS with the power and usability required to make everyone happy. Technology was making things easier for everyone: the developer, the end-user, and of course the lowly project manager stuck in the middle. At the time of this writing we have built over 25 sites with the complete range of functionality using WordPress. As we move into 2010 our client needs and expectations have grown over the years, but thankfully so has the functionality of the little blogging engine I fell in love with.

I know there are plenty of Joomla and Drupal advocates out there, do you have any stories about why you choose these systems over Wordpress? Or for you Wordpress folks please feel free to let us know about when you too fell in love with it?

The key word here is constant. Anyone at anytime could go to a candidates website and learn their views on the issues and how they plan to deal with them. They were taking advantage of higher bandwidths to show video and audio clips of rallies, speeches and even supporters’ home videos.

They were also taking full advantage of the e-commerce aspects of the web by not only offering sections to donate to the campaigns but also pages to buy t-shirts, buttons, coffee mugs and signs. The Obama-Biden site even has selected products for sale directly on the home page.

A major difference in their e-commerce sections was the user experience. Once in the McCain-Palin store each section takes you to a different looking third party e-com site that doesn’t even attempt to carry over any design or feel from the home site. This is in stark contrast to the Obama-Biden store experience that was fluid and consistent with no disconnect as the store carries every aspect of the design into their e-commerce interface.

Obama’s Store Page               Mccain’s Store Page

E-commerce was going to be an obvious method employed by both campaigns but there is a lot more the web has to offer. Both campaigns tried their hand at social networking, creating sites for supporters (and non-supporters) to join, interact, discuss, share and create efforts locally to debate, raise funds and raise awareness.

The McCain-Palin ticket actually took two cracks at it, the first attempt being highly scrutinized.  Adam Ostrow, writer for Mashable, an online publication, wrote, “The first version of the site, which launched early this year, is virtually impossible to use and appearing largely abandoned, which it was.”

When referring to the second attempt he wrote, “The new site is extremely easy to use, and includes a lot of social networking best practices like allowing users to sort videos by most viewed, highest rated, and most recent.” I personally went on the McCain-Palin social networking site community.mccainspace.com (since taken down) when it first came up and the first thing I noticed was the drop down menu went behind the Flash content rendering it useless. This was an issue isolated to the home page but it was like this for over a week.

However, overall this was a monumental improvement from the first attempt. This new site was done in KickApps, a white-label social networking site which has been a valuable partner to us here at eROI, and their platform supported a multitude of ways for McCain-Palin supporters to discuss topics and issues. They also took full advantage of the group capabilities of KickApps to form specific smaller communities within the the whole community. An example was a group dedicated to Hillary supporters that were now supporting McCain.

On the other hand the Obama-Biden Social Networking site My.BarackObama.com has been a success from the start even offering a simple, cohesive instructional video clearly laying out how to start an account and use your dashboard. Their attempt was clearly driven to get people in local communities to come together and spread the word through grass-roots efforts including organizing door-to-door campaigns.

Although missing some of the bells and whistles of the McCain-Palin Social site (KickApps’ widget features in particular) the Obama-Biden Social site was easy to use and powerful in its ability to bring people together to collaborate and organize.

Both campaign home pages are similar in layout and design with Obama’s looking more polished with time spent on detail and McCain’s looking more like an ad-driven template site. Both offer an “En Español” link to serve the site in Spanish which will be expanded to even more languages in the next election. Both had very similar content links and pages.

Obama’s Home Page               McCain’s Home Page

Both had a link to the issues with Obama having twenty-five issues to McCain’s nineteen to discuss. However McCain has three seperate blogs to Obamas one. Interestingly though, Obama has decided to not only have a page dedicated to the blog but also have the latest feeds right on the home page creating a somewhat long scrolling page.

In the end I would argue that Obama’s campaign has the edge through consistency and design while McCain’s web campaign seemed to be in a constant state of playing catch-up. Although willing to adapt and constantly work hard to have a stronger web presence the McCain web efforts were no match for a better funded, better thought out Obama-Biden web campaign.

So resizing images before uploading needed to be a part of the process of adding new content to the website.  From past experiences I know that just instructing a blogger or webmaster to ‘resize your image to 600 pixels wide’ is not necessarily enough to get them going, if they are not well-versed in the ways of image editing.  Even if they can take the red-eye out of their family photos in Photoshop, that doesn’t mean they know how to prepare an image for web.  When they upload their vacation pics to Flickr, it does all the resizing and prep work for them.  But we’re not developing Flickr-level apps over here. (Yet, anyway.)

So how to simplify this whole process so that it creates the least amount of frustration and confusion?

Luckily I stumbled upon this post at Read Write Web, listing 3 quick apps for resizing images.  I decided to give Shrink-O-Matic a try, since I have a PC, and it’s a cool Adobe Air app.  Plus it’s got a cool washing machine graphic on it and it’s all web 2.0 looking and stuff.

Aside from looking all fancy, it launches fast (after you install Adobe Air if you haven’t already), especially compared to Photoshop.  I hate waiting more than 5 seconds to open a program if all I want to do is resize it and save for web.  So there’s the quick part. And as for easy:  after tweaking your settings (maximum width/height, where to save, JPG quality) just ‘Drop pics here!’ like it says and it resizes, saves, and… there are no more steps.  It’s done.  I usually just set it up to overwrite originals (keeping the TRUE originals safely somewhere else), then get to uploading.

I’m hoping to introduce Shrink-O-Matic to a client soon and get their response.  I really think it has the potential to make their lives (and ours) much easier when it comes to updating their sites.  A properly-sized, compressed, quick-uploading picture is worth a thousand words.

And because I don’t want to end the post with a cliche, here’s a picture from my last hockey game that I resized using Shrink-O-Matic:

Go Pylons! :)