RedCell, an award winning PR company based in Coggeshall, Essex, launched its website officially today. It sports a clear and very user-friendly interface, and in some parts minimalistic.

The front page consists of a Flash movie of moving red cells; the clients section showcases their portfolio with some exceptional graphics.

The backend was implemented using CMSMadeSimple, an open source CMS system running on PHP and MYSQL. Due to the fact that the pages are generated dynamically through the database using Smarty templates, this could be a performance hit as more pages are added in future.

My solution to the problem was to implement an additional feature in the main page listing which allows the author to publish a HTML version of each page. The page and site contents are still stored in the database and can still be accessed through the existing features of the CMS.

If you are looking for a CMS, check out CMSMadeSimple.

RedCell can be reached at http://www.redcell.info.

Skyblue Creations has recently completed an in-house content management system for Nash Resorts.

My role involved building the backend system using PHP. Most of the site content such as the news items and galleries are powered by XML. This is processed by PHP classes using libraries such as ActiveLink XML. Bespoke functions and classes are also written to process and update static website pages.

The only database used is a SQLITE database used to manage user access.

I enjoyed the project as it is my first attempt at backend work without using databases to manage live content.