EE in the Wild: Walkiees and Gallery System

Two sites recently launched on ExpressionEngine that I want to tell you about. The first is a site for locating dog walks in the UK.

It’s called Walkiees and was built by an officer in the UK Border Agency. He previously had no web development experience but learned as much as he could about EE and just went for it. He wrote about the site in the EE Forums:

A buddy of mine, who is a web designer, said that they had recently switched all their site builds to EE, and that I should look into it.

I started consuming as much tutorials, podcasts and information as I could. […] I’ve never touched EE before, and I had VERY limited knowledge of HTML/CSS, but with the great support that I received here, Solspace, gwcode, and many many more support forums, I finally managed to get the site ready for its initial launch.

The site uses Solspace User and Favorites, Navee, SEO Lite, CP Analytics Settings, Accessible Captcha and more. Read the forum post for all the details.

He also notes:

I doubt very much that I have put the site together in the most efficient way, and its somewhat simplistic at the moment, but I think I have a good base to keep working and developing on.

Well, that’s how everyone starts. My first site is an embarrassment. Hell, there are things on this site that I wince at. Welcome to ExpressioneEngine and congrats on the launch!

The second site is Gallery System, a site that sells picture hanging systems. The site was developed by Versa Studio. In a forum post they listed the following add-ons in use: Structure, Wygwam and Matrix. UltraCart powers the e-commerce part of the site.

Interestingly, this site was originally done in EE1 but completely rebuilt in EE2. From the forum post:

The site was a from-scratch rebuilding of the previous EE1 site. Since we were changing a lot of information, we found it easier to start fresh than try to adapt what we had, especially since we switched to Structure for the new site.