How easy to convert a site to C5?

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Hi folks,

I have already converted my own very simple website to C5, and love the ease of editing etc, although I have yet to do much in the way of theming it.
My question is to do with my work's website. We are only a very small business so don't have buckets of $$ to spend on stuff like this. Our current website was built by a developer using their own internally developed CMS which is an absolute pain in the backside to use for updating the site. To be able to convert it to run on C5 would be a dream.
So, just wondering if anyone could spend a couple of minutes (not asking for a full analysis or anything like that) taking a peek at our site to see how easy it might be to convert. If it's on the very easy end of things, I will probably tackle it at some point, but if there's going to be a fair bit of work involved, we'd look at paying for conversion. So all I'm after at the moment is a quick heads-up. Sound possible?

The website ishttp://www.wallbrink.com.au

Cheers,
Richard

stretchrt
 
ThemeGuru replied on at Permalink Reply
ThemeGuru
Well it doesn't look imposible but like I wrote on our blog any one can do a c5 theme conversion but it takes a guru to do it right.

Plus if your wanting to utilize concrete5 to it's fullest a c5 developer would probably be best.

Nice looking site btw.

Hope that helps :)
stretchrt replied on at Permalink Reply
stretchrt
Yes well I don't know if we need to use c5 to its fullest. It's a fairly static site, with no social uses, ie no blog, users, forums etc.

All we do in terms of updating is add/remove project info (inc pictures) every few months or so. We'd just like an easy way of doing it when that time comes around.
jordanlev replied on at Permalink Reply
jordanlev
"Easy" is a relative term :)
This would be an easy site for someone who knows C5 to convert. The only tricky functionality is your portfolio (because I can't even really tell how it's supposed to work -- I'd recommend changing that to a more straightforward slideshow so that it's clearer to the user what they're doing and looking at, and because then you can just use an off-the-shelf slideshow addon from the marketplace instead of having one custom developed for you).

If you already are familiar with HTML and CSS and know how to build "static" (non-CMS) web pages, or if you already have experience building in other CMS's (like Wordpress, for exmaple), then it would definitely be feasible to take this on yourself. But if you don't have any general knowledge or experience with building complete pages in HTML/CSS, it's going to be very challenging to do this (not impossible, just very time-consuming to learn that whole side of things, then learn the C5 side of things).

There is a C5 job board that's free to post to:
http://www.concrete5.org/community/jobs...

Since you already have a site, it makes the process a lot easier because the existing site is your "spec" -- no guesswork about what you want or back and forth with designers.

Best of luck.

-Jordan
stretchrt replied on at Permalink Reply
stretchrt
Thanks Jordan, some useful comments there. I was thinking the portfolio bit would probably be the trickiest. I'll definitely have a think about whether a slideshow would be a better option or not, but it has been designed to manually click through images, and then the user can click on any image they want to see a larger version of. We definitely haven't had any complaints from clients yet about not being able to find stuff, but maybe we should do a little usability testing.

I do know how to put a static page together, I don't find HTML terribly difficult, although no doubt there are advanced techniques that are beyond me! I can also get along with CSS too, so for me it would be more learning how to take all that across to C5, and then any javascript etc that would need customising.

Maybe I should post to the job board and just see what sort of costs come back.

Anyway, thanks again, you're all a great bunch of people in here.