Our Technology Choices
We have carefully considered our technology choices before settling with the main software powering Northern Village. The main elements of choosing the software that we use is:
- It is a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering. As a client, you will never need to worry about the nuts and bolts of your website. Simply point your web browser to your website, and do what you need to do.
- It is simple and powerful. Our mantra is that the use of the software we choose is easily trainable -- with a short training session, that you will be up and running, and being productive.
- It is affordable.
Our main technogy choices of websites by YikeSite and online stores by Shopify follow these guidelines (both happen to be based on the Liquid templating language). There is a host of other SaaS software that we have used and more coming out on a regular basis. If you have a need for some online technology, let us know, and we can often find something for you.
A CMS developed and maintained by BCorps
Northern Village chooses Village CMS as the platform to build most of our websites.
Most importantly, Village makes it easy for anyone to easily update their own website, which means that it is simple to keep the websites up to date, improve the SEO, and stay relevant. It is easy to edit any page, add or move pages that go into the menu, add images, videos, and more.
Village CMS is also flexible in terms of website management. We like it because it organizes all of our websites on one convenient dashboard so that we can make updates quickly and easily. It also gives us a quick overview of when a website was last updated. What that means for the end user is that we can service our requests much faster and be much more effective. If you ever want to update your website, we can duplicate your existing site and have a nice sandbox that we can play in for creating your new website. Essentially, Village CMS helps us take 5 minute tasks and make them into 1 minute tasks. We love this for ourselves, and also offer a service to help anyone interested in managing many websites.
Another important feature is that Village CMS allows us to implement anything a designer can dream up in Photoshop, or other graphics program of their choice. A big part of this is that Village CMS is based on the Liquid templating language. On top of that we use Bootstrap because it is the most popular HTML, CSS, and JS framework for developing responsive, mobile first projects on the web. Take a look at our portfolio to see the varied websites that can be implemented.
Finally, using Village CMS means that we do not need to worry about keeping our customer websites up and running. We have never had to perform an upgrade to any of our websites because the software was out of date.
Why we use the Liquid templating language
Liquid is an open source project created by Shopify, and the basis of the Shopify e-commerce platform and by the YikeSite Content Management System, in addition to many other hosted web applications.
There are two main reasons to like Liquid.
- The power of simplicity
- Robust architecture
Power of simplicity
Liquid is a simple templating language, which is very easy to think that it is not very powerful. In fact, it is quite the opposite. The simplicity allows for nice logical constructs that fit nicely together and that are in the HTML layer, instead of having to program in php, C++, Django, Ruby or the like. It reads close enough to HTML that someone familiar with viewing source code could understand what is happening.
Robust architecture
Liquid is constructed as an HTML templating layer that sits on top of the server code, which has a number of advantages. First, logins to customize the websites remain at the HTML layer, specifically, users have no need to log into the server itself. Second, the functions that are called from liquid can be modified in such a way that the functions can evolve, and do not require server upgrades. Both Shopify and YikeSite have never required that website software be upgraded for system reasons. We like that security.