Using H&M for a Website

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Olivier Beltrami
Posts: 393
Joined: Mon Jul 15, 2002 3:30 pm
Location: Nantes, France
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Using H&M for a Website

Unread post by Olivier Beltrami »

Hi,

I have been using H&M for over 15 years to maintain my product's documentation and love it.

At the same time, my website is a hodge-podge of pages created almost 20 years ago in FrontPage and then manually tweaked in Notepad++ since then. Its pages are full of redundant tags, totally un-responsive, and a pain to maintain. The final straw was the discontinuation of Google Site Search which means I have to look for a new site search solution.

So, I am considering using H&M (with the Premium Pack) to re-do my website. The individual pages are relatively simple and fall into 3 categories:
  • • about 30-40 pages with fixed information (home page, contacts page, list of products, ...). Example at https://www.qppstudio.net/.
    • about 2500 pages listing public and bank holidays for 250 countries over a range of 5 years. These 2500 pages all come from a single template and are re-generated on the fly at night by a program I wrote (sample at https://www.qppstudio.net/publicholidays2017/bhutan.htm). I would need to be able to import these into my H&M project automatically, but I already do this for another project so I am not too concerned.
    • 10000+ (and increasing by about 1000 per year) "News Updates" pages which are also generated automatically every night as new public holidays are added, canceled or modified worldwide (sample page at https://www.qppstudio.net/public-holida ... 010637.htm)
My reasons for considering H&M are the following:
  • • Familiarity with the tool.
    • Generates clean HTML/CSS code that is Google and search-robot friendly.
    • Responsive layout; target PC, iPad and smartphones from one code base.
    • Can create a nice modern interface.
    • Supports variables (to update the copyright mention, for example).
    • Includes site searching.
    • Supports the importation of HTML pages (ie. I'd redo my templates in H&M, the "country holidays" template and the "news update" template for example, export them and then generate the 2500 and 10000+ pages using my software and then re-import them into H&M)
As you can see from the sample links, above, I do not need a lot of bells and whistles, the site is more about displaying information. So I can see a lot of positives, but I would like to know if anyone can think of negatives (ie. using the wrong tool, and why?).

Very best regards,

Olivier Beltrami
Olivier Beltrami
https://www.qppstudio.net
Worldwide Public Holidays and Calendar Data
Dave Gehman
Posts: 575
Joined: Sat Sep 23, 2017 9:05 pm

Re: Using H&M for a Website

Unread post by Dave Gehman »

Watching this topic with great interest. Thank you for asking.

Sorry, I"m far too new to give you a cogent answer, but I'm avidly awaiting cogent answers from others.
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Martin Wynne
Posts: 2656
Joined: Mon May 12, 2003 3:21 pm
Location: West of the Severn, UK

Re: Using H&M for a Website

Unread post by Martin Wynne »

One big advantage of using H&M for a website is that you can add any ancillary files to the Baggage Files, and they get uploaded along with everything else. No worry about forgetting to upload them, or creating a separate folder structure for them on the server. You can edit them if necessary directly in the Baggage Files folder, so the latest version will be uploaded next time. For example, if you are documenting an application, you may want to make available some samples of its native files.

If they are HTML files you can edit them directly in H&M.

In other circumstances, having everything in a single flat folder would be very messy. But with H&M handling everything, you don't actually ever need to look in the folder on the server.

Martin.
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