Seeking a UX/UI minded, C5 native designer to create a unique User Experience
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Like many, for a long time I have been an aspiring entrepreneur/business owner, and I have known for over a decade that I wanted my first business operating on C5.
My experience is in IT and marketing, though on an extremely limited budget, I aam as serious as ever about this. Seeking a ux/ui minded web designer to help me get my point across, as my users navigate (uncomvnetionally) to their destination and back, swiftly. Seeking a designer very versatile and accustomated to C5, to develop what I would hopefully be a unique interactive user experience.
Off topic, I am very curious to know if a "sophisticated' web application can be developed on C5. (mobile ready, reactive native?) I'm clueless... C5 being a CMS, am I correct to assume that the utilization of C5 isn't practical for developing anndroid and iphone app based on? Anyone of my ideas begin with promoting a landing page, so...am I overthinking it, and perhaps the developer of the mobile platforms will sync the data on a c5 cms? Which would require a separate, dedicated "web application" on c5? I'm sorry for that but if anyone can shed light on my obvious ignorant misconceptions, I'd greatly appreciate that. Please note that this project is not a l"arge scale" one.
To summarize this post I hope to find a great designer to bring a vision to life.
And if anyone can clarify my obvious lack of technical knowledge of developing a large scale, reliable web application, system/platform for mobile, that can cost well over $150,000 to have to do right...Could c5 play a role in such scenario?
Thank you,
Josh
My experience is in IT and marketing, though on an extremely limited budget, I aam as serious as ever about this. Seeking a ux/ui minded web designer to help me get my point across, as my users navigate (uncomvnetionally) to their destination and back, swiftly. Seeking a designer very versatile and accustomated to C5, to develop what I would hopefully be a unique interactive user experience.
Off topic, I am very curious to know if a "sophisticated' web application can be developed on C5. (mobile ready, reactive native?) I'm clueless... C5 being a CMS, am I correct to assume that the utilization of C5 isn't practical for developing anndroid and iphone app based on? Anyone of my ideas begin with promoting a landing page, so...am I overthinking it, and perhaps the developer of the mobile platforms will sync the data on a c5 cms? Which would require a separate, dedicated "web application" on c5? I'm sorry for that but if anyone can shed light on my obvious ignorant misconceptions, I'd greatly appreciate that. Please note that this project is not a l"arge scale" one.
To summarize this post I hope to find a great designer to bring a vision to life.
And if anyone can clarify my obvious lack of technical knowledge of developing a large scale, reliable web application, system/platform for mobile, that can cost well over $150,000 to have to do right...Could c5 play a role in such scenario?
Thank you,
Josh
concrete5 sites are able to support web apps for android/iphone in various ways:
- Mobile first themes
- As single page applications within a c5 site (there is at least one addon in the marketplace for packaging up such)
- Javascript applications (such as built with react) using the c5 API, so in the context of the app c5 is a headless cms that is used to manage its data.
Many c5 dashboard pages are effectively webb applications performing special-to-purpose functionality with the broader context of the dashboard. Similar can be said of many of the more complex addons.
As @linuxoid suggests, it may help if you could clarify your initial statement/intent. Do you have a $150,000 project budget, or are you aiming to implement a $150,000 project for $1,500?
- Mobile first themes
- As single page applications within a c5 site (there is at least one addon in the marketplace for packaging up such)
- Javascript applications (such as built with react) using the c5 API, so in the context of the app c5 is a headless cms that is used to manage its data.
Many c5 dashboard pages are effectively webb applications performing special-to-purpose functionality with the broader context of the dashboard. Similar can be said of many of the more complex addons.
As @linuxoid suggests, it may help if you could clarify your initial statement/intent. Do you have a $150,000 project budget, or are you aiming to implement a $150,000 project for $1,500?
Concrete is a great choice for building complex websites and applications. We've built some powerful apps in the past with it. It brings some real strengths to the table, but of course it's not right for everything.
Concrete has a very mature user, group and permissions model. Out of the box you've got a way to make accounts, associate custom attributes to track data about those users, and allow those users to start creating different types of content. There's built in workflow features around managing the approval and versioning of that content. All of this is stuff you'd be developing from scratch if you picked a more root level "framework" instead of Concrete CMS.
All of this functionality does come with a cost in performance however. The ability to really control who can edit what on a web page, coupled with the in-context editing experience takes hundreds of thousands of lines of code and an awful lot of database queries. We have lots of caching in place to keep things fast on the web, but it's still a lot of baggage to deal with if you don't need it. One question to consider is how much of your application is going to involve "organic" content.
When we think of content, we think of "structured" content and "organic" content. Structured is strongly typed. Think of a product record in an ecommerce system. You've got a name, price, sku, inventory count, 0-n pictures, etc. It's all pretty fixed what could be there and you don't expect that list to change much. Organic content changes a lot after the design phase is complete. Think of a marketing landing page full of stripes of content. The designer you paid launched a vision of it a year ago, but after testing in the real world you've moved some stripes around, you've added a paragraph here or there or slipped in an additional button. It changes based on ever changing needs.
Now there is absolutely overlap. A product in our marketplace here for example has some structured data like cost, reviews, license type - but it also has some organic content like the documentation that each 3rd party vendor can flush out as they see fit. You might think of a blog post as pretty structured, it's got a title, date, short description and long content - but that long content might end up with all sorts of things in it including functionality like surveys or image galleries.
This is where Concrete is going to add a lot of value. The thinking that the core team puts into this CMS is all about enabling the content creator to do things that were unexpected by the original site developer, without screwing things up.
Additionally, I'd offer that you'll have to make a choice in how you want to build the "app" side of your idea. You can make a website that looks good on a phone (responsive). You can make an app using a framework (typically Javascript, React is common) that pulls data out the website using an API. You can make a fully native app by writing in Java for Android and Objective C for iOS, and also using an API. Concrete has some methods for building APIs, but as of right now doesn't have a fully fledged API shipping out of the box so you'll have to craft that end too. Cost tends to go up as you move through those three options.
Personally, I'd look to that organic content issue when considering Concrete as a foundation for any application, whatever the mobile strategy might be.
So if I were building Waze, TikTok, Amung Us, etc - I'd probably look for a light weight framework that saved time on the expensive end of writing native code for the app, recognizing that all my content will be highly structured and managed by my own team that doesn't really need a user friendly CMS.
Some native apps we've built on top of Concrete installs in the past include:
1) A pricing/sales tool. This app connected to a website that started as a training portal for a large b2b hardware company. There were pages for each product, and organically they had grown to include documentation, specifications, features, even some pricing data. We built an API to feed all that data to an app, and we made a tree of choices a sales person could navigate to get to common BOM pricing for that product. The result was a ipad app that their sales team could use at tradeshows where internet connectivity was poor. They moved from having trifold brochures and single lady with an excel document that spit out pricing after 40 minutes of questions to a set of iPads that had product marketing information for every product right there, and the ability to make a custom quote they could sign right there. Quotes were sent up periodically and new product data came down with a sync process that could be run when internet was available. This app made them millions more than expected in a single weekend. It created an ecosystem where marketers could add new (and unexpected) data to the website and it would just magically be available to sales people after the next sync.
2) We made a mapping app for iphones that had a similar offline then sync approach. You could use it to track a path via GPS, and then you could take notes about waypoints on that path. When internet was available you could sync that data back upto a website where you could turn the content into a blog or research paper.
3) We made a app that pulled location and event information down from a joint military base into a native app. You could always know what was going on, and the base had a lot of flexibility to change what was going in on the event and location detail records.
Hopefully that gives you a sense of where Concrete would be a great fit.
last thing I'd leave you with is app development gets expensive quickly. Really consider what is the absolute minimum viable product you have to build to prove your market exists and will pay. Read Lean Startup by Eric Ries if you haven't already.
Good luck!
Concrete has a very mature user, group and permissions model. Out of the box you've got a way to make accounts, associate custom attributes to track data about those users, and allow those users to start creating different types of content. There's built in workflow features around managing the approval and versioning of that content. All of this is stuff you'd be developing from scratch if you picked a more root level "framework" instead of Concrete CMS.
All of this functionality does come with a cost in performance however. The ability to really control who can edit what on a web page, coupled with the in-context editing experience takes hundreds of thousands of lines of code and an awful lot of database queries. We have lots of caching in place to keep things fast on the web, but it's still a lot of baggage to deal with if you don't need it. One question to consider is how much of your application is going to involve "organic" content.
When we think of content, we think of "structured" content and "organic" content. Structured is strongly typed. Think of a product record in an ecommerce system. You've got a name, price, sku, inventory count, 0-n pictures, etc. It's all pretty fixed what could be there and you don't expect that list to change much. Organic content changes a lot after the design phase is complete. Think of a marketing landing page full of stripes of content. The designer you paid launched a vision of it a year ago, but after testing in the real world you've moved some stripes around, you've added a paragraph here or there or slipped in an additional button. It changes based on ever changing needs.
Now there is absolutely overlap. A product in our marketplace here for example has some structured data like cost, reviews, license type - but it also has some organic content like the documentation that each 3rd party vendor can flush out as they see fit. You might think of a blog post as pretty structured, it's got a title, date, short description and long content - but that long content might end up with all sorts of things in it including functionality like surveys or image galleries.
This is where Concrete is going to add a lot of value. The thinking that the core team puts into this CMS is all about enabling the content creator to do things that were unexpected by the original site developer, without screwing things up.
Additionally, I'd offer that you'll have to make a choice in how you want to build the "app" side of your idea. You can make a website that looks good on a phone (responsive). You can make an app using a framework (typically Javascript, React is common) that pulls data out the website using an API. You can make a fully native app by writing in Java for Android and Objective C for iOS, and also using an API. Concrete has some methods for building APIs, but as of right now doesn't have a fully fledged API shipping out of the box so you'll have to craft that end too. Cost tends to go up as you move through those three options.
Personally, I'd look to that organic content issue when considering Concrete as a foundation for any application, whatever the mobile strategy might be.
So if I were building Waze, TikTok, Amung Us, etc - I'd probably look for a light weight framework that saved time on the expensive end of writing native code for the app, recognizing that all my content will be highly structured and managed by my own team that doesn't really need a user friendly CMS.
Some native apps we've built on top of Concrete installs in the past include:
1) A pricing/sales tool. This app connected to a website that started as a training portal for a large b2b hardware company. There were pages for each product, and organically they had grown to include documentation, specifications, features, even some pricing data. We built an API to feed all that data to an app, and we made a tree of choices a sales person could navigate to get to common BOM pricing for that product. The result was a ipad app that their sales team could use at tradeshows where internet connectivity was poor. They moved from having trifold brochures and single lady with an excel document that spit out pricing after 40 minutes of questions to a set of iPads that had product marketing information for every product right there, and the ability to make a custom quote they could sign right there. Quotes were sent up periodically and new product data came down with a sync process that could be run when internet was available. This app made them millions more than expected in a single weekend. It created an ecosystem where marketers could add new (and unexpected) data to the website and it would just magically be available to sales people after the next sync.
2) We made a mapping app for iphones that had a similar offline then sync approach. You could use it to track a path via GPS, and then you could take notes about waypoints on that path. When internet was available you could sync that data back upto a website where you could turn the content into a blog or research paper.
3) We made a app that pulled location and event information down from a joint military base into a native app. You could always know what was going on, and the base had a lot of flexibility to change what was going in on the event and location detail records.
Hopefully that gives you a sense of where Concrete would be a great fit.
last thing I'd leave you with is app development gets expensive quickly. Really consider what is the absolute minimum viable product you have to build to prove your market exists and will pay. Read Lean Startup by Eric Ries if you haven't already.
Good luck!
Hey Josh,
Good points by all the commenters above but I did shoot you a PM if you're looking for someone to chat with regarding your project and it's design.
- Jordan
Good points by all the commenters above but I did shoot you a PM if you're looking for someone to chat with regarding your project and it's design.
- Jordan
Hello,
I can surely help you out in this, have experience designer with 5+years of experience in all type of designing.
please share detail about your requirement on my email Vanessa@cisinlabs.com.
I will share sample work with you.
Best Regards,
Vanessa
I can surely help you out in this, have experience designer with 5+years of experience in all type of designing.
please share detail about your requirement on my email Vanessa@cisinlabs.com.
I will share sample work with you.
Best Regards,
Vanessa
- "on an extremely limited budget" AND "application that can cost well over $150,000",
- "this project is not a large scale one" AND "a sophisticated web application",
- "this project is not a large scale" AND "developing a large scale, reliable web application"
are mutually exclusive or contradicting.