ChiefPundit

Thanks @AndZyk for that CSS tip. Have alerted my Tech on this. Ever grateful.

Hmm @zoeck the client has added a new testimonial - PW is so easy to use after all:-)).

Will get this corrected. Thanks.

Thank you @AndZyk for the warm comments. Noted the issues with CSS. Will correct. Unni.

BayTech360 is a System Integrations Specialist serving the US out of San Francisco. 

They wanted to revamp their website and asked Pigtail Pundits to help with it.

The new website is built to storytelling standards of StoryBrand and other direct response advertising frameworks.

This site features, sell-focussed copy which is our trademark. This is mapped to an elegant, clean design.

Built atop ProcessWire, our favourite CMS, with ProCache for speed.

Check it out at: https://www.baytech360.com/

Thanks Bill for the glowing words. We are joined at the hips, aren't we?

Thanks @Hamilton Wallace. What a pleasant surprise to see you here.  Our association is a long one and here's to more of it.

Thanks @Ivan Gretsky. Your point is noted and the Case Study for PP will get in there for sure.

Thanks @Mont for your interesting observation.

While what you say is one way to interpret it, the U with the dot has a spiritual significance. 

Quote

The U with a dot in it represents the tilaka, a mark of auspiciousness in Hinduism. It is worn on the forehead with sandal paste, sacred ashes or kumkum (red tumeric). While there are many forms of tilaka, the one we have in our logo is traditionally the mark of Vaishnavites, the followers of Vishnu.

Thank you @horst for all the warm comments.

Your question is answered here: https://www.pigtailpundits.com/about-us/our-name/

Warmly, Unni.

Visit Pigtail Pundits

For a digital agency, finding the time to do your own website is always difficult. It gets marred by other priorities - new projects and ongoing projects. 

Unless of course, there’s some slack, and you’re alert to leverage it. We were lucky to steal some 30 odd days from other work. In the bargain we revamped our old website into something fresh, complete with updates on our newer solutions and Case Studies.
 

The Thinking Behind the Design & Copy

The whole subject of digital marketing is abstract and fuzzy to most clients. Jargon, complicates its understanding further.

If we could use a familiar metaphor to describe the digital marketing solutions that we provide along with its benefits, we could perhaps inch closer to getting messages understood. Or so we thought. 

Equally, we could introduce some flavour into the language that metaphors do allow.

Metaphors, by the way, are double-edged swords. It clarifies and also confuses. It tickles your imagination. It can also put people off. 

Extreme reactions, we felt, are far better than neutral ones. That was a risk that we decided to take knowing the consequences.

Quote

We likened digital marketing to selling the produce of an orchard. 

The theme lends itself to some delightful metaphors which are not part of the usual digital marketing lexicon.  The tone is aggressive. The metaphors help in blunting the sharpness.

The metaphors color the language and visuals. The overall effect of this is unique.

We also attempted to peel off some of the fuzziness that exists in digital marketing, especially in India, using copy.

We tried to identify with the pains of the customer and then focus on our solutions as the best answers to the pains. 

We followed the StoryBrand framework by Donald Miller to craft the copy in the Solutions section.

Visit Pigtail Pundits

Under the Hood

We have been votaries of ProcessWire since 2014 and have always used it on our own and client projects to great benefit. 

This occasion too was no different for our own website. Under the hood it uses

1. Processwire CMS
2. Bootstrap for theming
3. Form Builder
4. ProCache [gives us a page speed between 2 and 3 secs]
5. Custom PHP for image alt tags
6. SVG icons to reduce the weight and improve page speed.

Visit Pigtail Pundits

Bouquets and brickbats, welcome.

Thank you @heldercervantes.

Thank you @tpr.

Writer Relocations is one of India's oldest and finest packing and moving companies.

Their new website at has been developed using the flexible ProcessWire CMS by Pigtail Pundits.

Writer Relocations is a 63-year-old company handles domestic India moves, international moving, fine art moving, commercial moving, and office moving. Its new site takes off from the 20 odd pages, originally housed on the Writer Corporation, the corporate website.

ProcessWire has been the recommended CMS at Pigtail Pundits for close to 4 years now. Therefore PW was the natural choice for building this website.

Premium PW plugins such as Form Builder, Profields, Autolinks, and ProCache were used as part of the build.

The new site has over 120 pages of content, most of which has been rewritten from scratch and revisualized according to modern website practices. The real challenge on this project was research and the tone of its communications.

Since the site was launched it has been steadily streaming in new leads every day for the client.

@3fingers - thank you for the observations.

Will correct the JS error and have noted your feedback on the animation. 

Thanks once again.

Our old website was built on WordPress site some 5 years ago. It was dated in design and was getting very difficult to manage.

We had to change. ProcessWire has been our default CMS for 2 years now so it had to be Pigtail Pundits on PW. The theme was custom built on Foundation 5.  

Were we asking too much of ourselves? 

With projects and other work interrupting this dream?  It took some time to cook - a year in the making. Plus, some distractions like the logo change after we started the design.

The copy was re-written twice. Finally, we dropped everything else and put all our energies to make it live in January this year. And quietly worked on parts that still needed working since.

It’s now ready to be seen: https://www.pigtailpundits.com

The Functionality

1. PageTable Extended with ProFields for page layouts that break the rhythm
2. ProCache for fast caching
3. Sendy for Newsletters
4. Download Guard for PDF downloads
5. FormBuilder for forms
6. Animate.css for on-page effects
7. Custom coding for email a friend and Print this.
8. SVG images for logo, branding

Let the opinions flow in.

Thanks Mike for all the lovely suggestions for improvement. Will heed.

I managed to exit the code block:-). Thanks.

Pleasure @Sinnut. And to all those who liked this, thanks.

The Background
In April 2015, we were asked by CSDC Systems, to revamp their website.

CSDC Systems is a Toronto-based company selling cloud-powered, process improvement technology to local governments, regulatory institutions,
courts, universities, and granting agencies all over the world.

CSDC Systems had a website that was built on Drupal 7.x, was difficult to update internally by their staff, had maintenance issues apart from being a very design dated website.

The Objectives
>> Create a modern, world-class website that sells CSDC's Solutions
>> Highlight the benefits and advantages of the solutions and the company
>> Make the site responsive and browsable across devices
>> Give them a system that could be updated by non-technical users in their company.

The Challenges
>> Re-architect the entire website to make it usable by b2b clients
>> Rewrite the copy with pain/gain/ benefits orientation
>> Redesign to make it more visually appealing despite long copy
>> Get results

Re-imagining the CSDC Systems Website
>> The old site had 350 pages of information with the bulk of it being blogs/ news. Blogs and News were ported and reformatted to make it visually appealing.
>> 120 pages of copy to do with Solutions, Services, Platform, Case Studies and Whitepapers were rewritten and visualized ground up
>> The persuasion structure with social proof - testimonials, Case Studies, Why CSDC was re-imagined and then reconstructed

The Technology
>> This was more a fairly large, prestigious, communications-driven website without any major technology challenges.
>> The site uses Processwire CMS with Foundation 5 CSS framework
>> The front-end page structure and design were mirrored using repeaters and fields at the backend.
>> Forms, Profields, Autolinks, Tags, SEO are some of the plugins used
>> The site uses ProCache.

The Result
The tutorial for the client over Skype lasted one hour and the happy part is that they are up and way confidently after that. The client's response:

I was surprised that the site administration could be so intuitive and manageable by anyone with little technical knowledge.

Coming from an old Drupal website, we shall take that as a true compliment for Processwire.

The site is blazing fast. Records A: 94% on Google Page Speed and A: 92% on YSlow at GTMetrix. A nifty 1.6s load time with proCache turned on.

You can view the new site at: http://www.csdcsystems.com/

@Joss, like I said the best way to sell PW, is to demo a test backend/ front-end website with a client and allow him/ her to play with it.

If they say they like WP, then they will know better when they use PW. Most of the fear in folks is in the mind and this is the best way to tackle it.

There are other things that systems such as WP have going for them though:

>> An ecosystem of themes and theme designers/ developers which make for selling templated websites and lowering costs

>> An extensive set of plug and play plugins which too lowers costs

>> Entire verticals such as schools, doctors, restaurants, hotels, etc, covered via plugins/ themes

>> An extensive and exhaustive set of 3rd party integrators and vendors for virtailly anything you want to do with it

>> Sheer number of users, developers, clients who add so much weight to swing opinion in WPs favor

>> Tutorials, how tos, ebooks, marketers who recommend it in/ as part of their work

Hopefully, as PW matures and more agencies and professional embrace it, we should see installation profiles, recipes and plugins adding to make the system popular.

I am not sure whether theming can be done in advance like the other CMSs in PW, because everything is custom-built within it. The alternative is to package themes with the an installation profile itself. Drupal themers such as themesnap do this already.

We will have to deal with these issues, should they come up, effectively with whatever logic we can summon. Well, the other way of looking at all this is there is opportunity in PW to create all this for many of us:-)

As someone who has been using WP, Joomla and Drupal before Processwire, to build a variety of websites across industries, here's my take on this:

1. Wordpress is good as a one time solution to the problem. Problems can occur when a client comes back to you, 2 years after you have developed the website, asking for additional functionality. Example, please add woocommerce to the site. This means the website needs to be upgraded to the latest WP version; the theme will surely break after the upgrade and would need to be fixed; you then add woocommerce and theme it anew to fix the site. This is as good as redoing the whole thing. The same problem exists in Joomla and Drupal too to a greater or lesser degree
    
2. The issue of creating a custom solution for the client, as @joss has mentions above, exists with Joomla and WP. You are always working around modules, plugins and code to create. The result is always an inelegant solution.
   
   Eg: This content piece comes from modules/ widgets.
   That piece comes from content area.
   The other page comes from K2 and so on.
   
   The content on a page comes from different places on the backend with most of these systems and that's counter-intuitive. Clients will find this difficult to understand without some practice.
   
   PW is so much more elegant, easier and intuitive for both the developer and the user. Everything can be made logical and sensible in PW.
    
3. The biggest problem is bloat caused by too many plugins:
   
   bloat in code, bloat in css, bloat in js.
   
   Drupal is a beast. WP and Joomla, don't lag behind.
   
   Followed by breaks caused by plugin/JS incompatibility and the time required to fix these in these systems.
    
4. I recently trained a client on a system built with PW. It took all of 20 minutes. For WP, I have to gives a long lecture on posts and pages and the difference between them. I have to explain widgets and demonstrate which elements in a page come from where. 
    
5. As mentioned elsewhere in this forum, WP/ Joomla/ Drupal are safe bets for clients. One way to explain the benefits of PW perhaps is to demo the client a test site which you have and ask him/ her to poke around, or guide the person through it in all of 20 minutes. Perhaps you could have a WP site too to contrast the ease of PW. That should seal the deal. 

Ivan, always happy to oblige:-)

The backend is not customized. It uses the Modesta Theme which we felt was a tad better than the default. We were under tight time pressures to launch the site and decided to skip any backend customization.

For the time being, permissions are just for backend admin - web, magazine editorial. There was an idea we had mooted with roles for users who submit photos, but because of the launch deadline, we have deferred that bit for Phase 2. 

I am appending a screenshot of the backend, just to show you what we have done.

The Block-System that you see, is for organizing the Home Page content. It has 3 regions [left, middle, right], very similar to Drupal's regions, in the template. Within each region, post excerpts can be added by the admin for control of the Home Page content.

Magazines and Web Editorial, are organized by month.

Trust that answers your questions.

Pete, I reckon all what you have stated are the reasons why so many of us have gravitated to Processwire. 

I did a bit of scouting before we ended with Processwire.

The search was for light, fast systems [coming from Joomla, WP, Drupal that was necessary] as we had enough problems building large sites with those CMS. And what I read and saw about PW here was promising. We started with one programmer who was briefed to experiment with it and within a week he was going ga ga over PW. We then took it forward to the entire team. Now, we have 10 of them working on Processwire, on various projects. 

PW is the choice CMS at Pigtail Pundits, replacing WordPress and the occasional Drupal project.

It has given the team here new energy and fresh possibilities and that's remarkable in itself. May it continue in absolute abundance, for PW, and for the entire community behind this remarkable system.

Thanks a ton Pete for the on-page links. I'd forgotten that bit when I wrote the post.

Just to clarify. We didn't build the whole site in Drupal. We had started in earnest on it. We had a few content types ready, one entire magazine was inputted, the gallery was tested and some social stuff such as Instagram and Facebook were being experimented with. We had also gone ahead with some styling on Drupal for the demo. It was after all this that we decided to switch to Processwire. Data Entry came much later, as you've guessed. 

Processwire is simply remarkable for sites like these.

The key things for the team here were:

>> Easy to understand and work with [learning curve compared to other CMS is negligible]

>> Fast [no code bloat]

>> Flexible for both programming and theming

>> Scalable, for publisher/user driven content sites as in National Geographic Traveller India

I guess that we were also lucky in that we had this wonderful project to work on, were experimenting with Processwire at that precise time, and then decided to shift to Processwire from Drupal. That's one heck of a karmic combination of events.

Will check the 404 bit, thanks.

Thank you Christophe. I shall check out MailerLite.

Thanks Manaus. Will add RSS.

Got that Ivan. Will check and correct. Thank you very much.