Website Question(s)

[Cwilk]

There's a good possibility we may be redesigning this website but I wanted to find out if any of you know the answers to these questions:

First of all, here's the website:
Siegfried & Roy - Masters of the Impossible

1. Can you tell if this system is a CMS system?
2. If its not a CMS already, can the current design using the existing programming be converted into a CMS?
3. If the website design/programming can be converted into a CMS, is it a difficult switchover or easy?
4. Is this programming fairly clean to work with in it's present state?

I have one other question, but I'll wait and post it depending on the answers that come back.

Thanks guys!
CWilk
Christina
:)

[Harry]

I think you're confusing programming and coding—view source on a website shows you its markup, nothing to do with programming.

Bearing that in mind, your questions depend on whether you're using a pre-made CMS… If so then you're probably best off recoding the front-end from scratch.
If you're getting a programmer to write a CMS from the ground up (which I suspect you're not) then he could work his stuff around what's already there. Make sense?

[Cwilk]

I actually looked at the source code but I'm not sure in viewing it whether or not this website was created with a CMS. It looks like it could have been, but I can't tell.

We will be using the same design, although we'd like to start clean .... from scratch, but in quoting a new website, we don't want to lose the project if we could have easily said that we can work with what's there.

So if we can work with what's already there and add a CMS on to it, that's our preference.

I get so confused about the difference coding and programming. .... sorry about that.

[Harry]

You can reuse stuff like certain snippets of CSS and the images there, but you'd not be able to literally lift the CSS and marry it up with the new CMS as element and ID names wouldn't match up…

[Cwilk]

That's kind of what I was wondering...... but can you tell just by looking at the source code if the website is working off a CMS already?

[Cwilk]

And thanks so much for your answers. I only know enough to be dangerous, but I never go there with my danger :)

[Scriptage]

It's got a .php extension which means that they are most likely doing some things programmatically, it may be as simple as using includes or as complicated as pulling things from a database (CMS style). I'd rule out the use of Zend due to the URI style but other than that it's hard to say.

As Harry said, if you get a programmer write a CMS from scratch then you could use the current design as a template. It wouldn't be that difficult to do it that way to be honest.