CREM is where I work. I took over the admin of the website in 2013. It was already a beautiful website with a colourful layout. But it was static, mostly HTML with just a couple of PHP includes for the menus and banners. I rebuilt it entirely using Joomla 2.5.

The main benefit was obviously to make it collaborative. Members have an account to manage their profile page and to post items like seminars and publication announcements. As a side bonus, in the process of programming the layout as a Joomla template, I also got rid of tables (replaced by divs) and added some responsiveness by using dynamic widths.

For a team such as ours, having a collaborative website is both a challenge and an opportunity. The risk is that if members don’t get involved then… no one else will. Then the site will stagnate, become outdated, its hair will fall and its teeth will turn yellow. On the other hand, the opportunity is exactly that too: if people do get involved, it is very easy to have a very reactive website. Not only the contents stay up-to-date, but the navigation, the colours, the graphics, anything can be rearranged on the spot to suit our needs. That’s why I’m keeping the tech admin of this website, instead of having the CREM hire someone else. At least for now, it offers the best conditions for reactivity. No excuses when things are outdated!