EE in the Wild: Jim Renaud

I like to bring to your attention a lot of different types of EE-powered websites. I haven’t done a lot of personal blogs, so I think it’s time to do that. The next couple of sites I feature on EE in the Wild will be personal sites.

Today I want to introduce you to Jim Renaud. Jim is a freelance designer and used ExpressionEngine to build his personal blog. He described his new blog in his entry “Credit where credit is due,” but I also asked him to share some more EE-specific information about his new personal site.

Why did you choose ExpressionEngine?

I chose ExpressionEngine because I feel it’s the easiest way for a person with front-end experience to make a website with a high quality and flexible content management system. For the most part it allows a designer like myself to design a site without thinking of how the CMS is gonna ruin the vision of my design.

I designed the site in Photoshop and created the entire PSD files for three pages: the homepage, the full-post/comments page and the search results page. I then sliced and diced the files like I would any site and coded the site to work with static content in the browser. Then when I get it working the way that I want it, I simply started replacing the static content with ExpressionEngine tags. I don’t have to worry about creating themes or finding tons of 3rd party extensions to do basic stuff.

What was your experience building your blog with EE?

I wanted to build a site and launch it very quickly. My current site was done very quickly. I spent about three days from finished code to implementing the CMS. Never once did adding the EE tags return results that were unexpected or broke my other code.

Another strength of EE is that there are tons of more add-ons that I want to add to my site eventually like Live Search, Categories and Tag Clouds and others to grow my site. The only education I’ve used to learn to build this site came from the EE Screencasts and the occasional EE Wiki or EE Knowledge Base for things not covered in the screencasts. I am very happy with the process and glad I switched from Wordpress to ExpressionEngine.

For add-ons, Jim used Akismet, eeFlickr and EE Gravatar.