We don’t normally do commercial website design outside of handling our own needs at radiantphotography.com and whiteproductphotography.com. However, we are a sponsor of the Fabulous Sin City Rollergirls, handling all their roller derby photography needs, and we had a cool opportunity come up.

We’ve been maintaining their website for some time now, but it was in desperate need of a redesign. It was difficult to update, html-formatted in FrontPage 2000, and simply lacked modern website features and expandability. After many hours of research on content management systems, we decided to give Joomla a try, and so far we couldn’t be happier. The up-front work is extensive, with all the pitfalls and joys of learning a new system, but once the bones are there, the updates are fairly easy.

Joomla isn’t right for every client. We have no intentions of rebuilding the Radiant or Whiteproductphotography.com sites using Joomla, as it just doesn’t look as custom as what we have now. That’s probably more a shortcoming of our abilities than Joomla’s, but for now things will stay put. However, for realtors, sports teams, nonprofits, financial companies, and other organizations that need scalability, live feeds, and easy to use galleries, Joomla is a perfect match.

The Fabulous Sin City Rollergirls website now features CSS compliant coding, cross-browser uniformity, easier to navigate page structure, expandable photo galleries, a live news feed from Derby Network News with the latest derby news, voting polls to get fans involved, and more. It’s a work in progress, but it’s a nice start.

Check out the Fabulous Sin City Rollergirls at http://www.sincityrollergirls.com
If you live in or are visiting Las Vegas, you really should come see a bout. These girls are tough cookies.