A new website for the Old Brightonians - the Alumni of the Brighton College
We've been building and maintaining sites for Brighton College's Alumni since 1998. The last few iterations have all been on the wonderful Open Source Joomla platform and this latest version is no exception.
The brief was essentially very simple: maintain current functionality and content and migrate to the latest version of Joomla and a new fully responsive template - a process we're well used to and which normally runs smoothly and without too many issues.
The new site dovetails with their new Alumni database site (on Graduway) and neatly embeds their event booking system, meaning that the Joomla CMS isn't doing too much "heavy lifting" beyond the delivery of what has become a vast and varied body of tagged content across many categories. The challenge on sites like this is ensuring that "busy" doesn't become "cluttered" and I think with this client we've always achieved that, even going so far as to frequently demo the work to prospective and existing clients as a good example of content delivery.
The site - and its many versions over the years - also serves as a great indictment of this wonderful CMS; in many ways Joomla is far less configurable and versatile than Drupal, but when budget, time and client familiarity dictate it remains a popular and well proven weapon in our arsenal.