Welcome to the new Vimia website!
Today I published the new Vimia website, which I hope will give a clearer view of the activities and services offered by my company, Vimia GmbH, than the older website did. Like the old site, the new one is bilingual (English and German).
What has changed?
I hope that it is now clearer what Vimia offers you. In brief, this is:
- Services (IT, Internet, Business, Language)
- Know-How (Skills, Open Source, Other Software)
Follow the links above for more details of the offering.
Most obviously, the design of the website has changed. The design is now a little more colourful and – more importantly – fluid, meaning that the site's design adapts as the visitors change font size or the size of the browser window.
A further design feature which may not be immediately obvious is the use of WOFF, the Web Open Font Format. Neither of the fonts used by Vimia ("Vimia" and "Gentium Basic") are commonly available on desktop computers or mobile phones: WOFF makes them available by embedding them within the website and downloading them to browsers as needed.
The major difference is under the hood, however. I will admit to being an XML geek, and because of this, the original Vimia website was implemented using Cocoon, which is pretty much pure XML. Unfortunately, at the time I implemented the original site, there were not many easy-to-use CMS's based on Cocoon, so I ended up basically building my own CMS on top of Cocoon and had to add a separate product, Roller, to provide blogging capability.
Four years on, the CMS market has changed fundamentally and I have discovered Drupal. I'm not overly fond of PHP, which Drupal is written in, but it keeps out of the way for the most part. Drupal has an amazing selection of modules which allow all sorts of extensions and other conveniences, so it didn't take me long to decide to switch to Drupal.
The technical work was quickly done, including the design, which is CSS based. Getting the whole thing to work in a 256MB virtual machine was a little more complicated though, partly because I use PostgreSQL as the back-end database and PostgreSQL is a little more resource-hungry than the standard MySQL.
The ultimate key to making it all work was abandoning Apache HTTP, an amazingly versatile webserver which, however, consumes a lot of resources. Instead I used Nginx, which has a much smaller footprint than Apache HTTP, and PHP FPM.
So, let me know what you think...
Steve
