For as complex as it is, TYPO3 is pretty usable. I built a site on TYPO3 before I ever messed with WordPress some 6 years ago. Now that I think of it, I'd probably opt for TYPO3 before Drupal.
I've used Wordpress on a number of sites for small businesses & restaurants lately. In every case it has fit the bill.
Other CMSs I've looked at are way overkill, and while I've toyed with the idea of building my own custom CMS, the fact is I can get everything I need in a 5-minute WordPress installation and 30 minutes of plugin configuration. Theme development is straight-forward and relatively well-documented.
The investment in rolling your own is a mite more than 35 minutes. Even the act of walling off or hiding portions of Drupal is more involved than that.
I don't think you know how large ecommerce websites work. Pricing, availability, listing pages are all generated dynamically. "Static web content" doesn't even get close to describing how an ecom page gets served with that many variables. You can't simply create a version for every permutation of visitor and cache it.
Disclaimer: I hate you. Restaurant sites are my cash cow, so anything that gets in the way of that receives my rage.
Feedback: Your site looks unpolished. You disclaimed as much; I'm just confirming.
Concept is solid. And it sets you up for a premium model with additional features. Your menu handling looks interesting; it is a challenge I face with clients that we usually solve by embracing the devil and publishing a PDF. Grr. However I am going to be doing something very similar to what you have going on.
Your feature set and layouts/design/default copy are pretty solid. Covers the basics. Events is the piece I end up doing on all my clients' sites. Typically a simple event feature (like your menu editor) suffices. Event name, description, date, time.
For a restaurant site, I don't see a link to #top or home on your nav bar which would be handy.
The editor is nice. I like how it moves to the section you're editing and the ajax update is uber handy.
No clean way to exit the editor and go back to the admin dashboard. And now that I'm logged out I can't seem to log back in. No confirmation email either.
Would be handy to let the visitor print out the menu I think .
Analytics needs to be there. If you could rig up page views and some simple actions (e.g. your menu was printed x number of times). throw in some widget like AddThis and you're good to go without tons of dev.
Crap. Nice work. Good thing your domain name stinks and is easily forgotten or else I'd be in trouble.
Our HTML dev team builds the HTML/CSS so that we can complete our UI specs, then when we hand off the final HTML/CSS and UI spec to our big money development team, they rebuild it from PSDs. They use the same CSS structure framework, so there's no good reason, but we basically pay for the same work twice. If we send code, they throw it out.
How about rather than asking web designers, server owners and IT staff everywhere to add some hack tag to their code, you force IE8 into compatibility mode unless a designer specifically enables IE8 rendering on their page by adding said tag? That mediates the issue pretty easily.
IIRC, they were originally planning to do exactly what you said, requiring a special tag to enable standards compliance in IE8, but there was a gigantic backlash from the web development and standards community.
Why? Because then we get nowhere; all the clueless web designers never find out about the special tag to make IE8 comply with internet standards, and continue making webpages for the broken IE rendering model for the next 10 years.
We need to make all those old websites break, because otherwise they'll never comply with modern standards. We need to have standardsbased rendering be the default because then the designers that test against IE8 will be making sites that work better with other browsers.
By forcing developers to realize that their websites are non-compliant (either from angry users or specifically forcing quirks mode) and by defaulting to standards-based rendering, we make the web design future a much nicer place to be.
Because by default IE8 will try to render sites in a standards-compliant way. If you designed your site to work around all the quirks, bugs and non-standard stuff in older versions of IE, then your site might not work properly in IE8 by default.
This is a good thing because getting your code to be cross-browser compatible should be a lot easier now.
Microsoft just does not want to leave behind all the people who worked hard to make their code work with their older, broken versions of IE.
I'm no MS fanboy but it seems me that IE8 is going to be a pretty big improvement. I hope. :-)
I was just thinking to myself, surely Gmail isn't down. Then this popped into my GoogleReader. Good thing they're not running all their services from the same box. :)
