Simple Intergration

[leewells]

Greetings,

 

We are a web development company that services locally mainly and some clients abroad. When I intergrated WHMCS into the "feel" of our already made website, I couldn't let the twitter style go to waste so this is what we did:

 

Site: http://goldsborowebdevelopment.com

WHMCS: https://my.goldsborowebdevelopment.com

[Alex - Arvixe]

First off: Your website loads quite slowly for me. Slow enough that if I was a potential client I'd navigate elsewhere.

 

The integration is good though you sort of cut off the footer? I'd probably add a integrated footer (albeit not the full big menu but enough to keep it somewhat consistent.

[leewells]

First off: Your website loads quite slowly for me. Slow enough that if I was a potential client I'd navigate elsewhere.

 

I'm not sure how this is possible. We're a CloudFlare partner and use them religiously. Our sites are ranked on PageSpeed as 5/5 stars for loading in under a half a second. What sort of internet throughput are you working with?

 

(after a cache flush)

 

The integration is good though you sort of cut off the footer? I'd probably add a integrated footer (albeit not the full big menu but enough to keep it somewhat consistent.

 

Yeah the footer of the original site contained the news widget which we did not want to have to "mess" with so we just left it with WHMCs's footer for now. As I said, it was a simple integration because the only real modifications that were made was to the background color, header background, logo, and logo-area background (and we spliced the menu in).

 

It is just an example of how simple an integration can be which was my reason for posting it.

 

Nevertheless, I do appreciate and value your feedback. Thank you!

Edited March 16, 2013 by leewells

[DavidBee]

Well thats no doubt why your website is loading slow. I find cloudflare does slow the majority of sites down.

 

With regards to your design I do like the header but sadly the menu does not work very well. Maybe remove the black background and have the orange nav?

[leewells]

Well thats no doubt why your website is loading slow. I find cloudflare does slow the majority of sites down.

 

I don't buy that cloudflare slows sites down any at all if you're running a complex php website because it reduces queries and serves cached html when possible.

 

I've checked mutliple other thirdparty tools online and nearly all of them concure:

 

http://www.iwebtool.com/speed_test?domain=http%3A%2F%2Fgoldsborowebdevelopment.com%0D%0Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fmy.goldsborowebdevelopment.com (0.4s load)

 

http://gtmetrix.com/reports/goldsborowebdevelopment.com/KQNuBwe3 Grade A+

 

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights#url=http_3A_2F_2Fgoldsborowebdevelopment.com&mobile=false 90/100 score

 

So, I'm pretty sure the site isn't loading slow unless the user is on dial-up or something

 

Even in comparision to your own site HostSurfUK:

 

http://gtmetrix.com/compare/tLpBKXDZ/AYbkyHOq

 

We score again an A, you score a B.

 

And even Google said:

The page cPanel Hosting - UK Shared and Resell... got an overall PageSpeed Score of 85 (out of 100).

 

We were a 90/100.

 

So please tell me again how CloudFlare slows a website down?

 

 

With regards to your design I do like the header but sadly the menu does not work very well. Maybe remove the black background and have the orange nav?

 

It was our intention to leave the WHMCS nav alone. We did not include anything that touches the navigation bar except the orange bar that runs behind it as part of the background image. If you're having technical issues with the bar, you need to talk to WHMCS about that because it is part of the default theme. The only thing about the navigation that I could think to make it look any better without changing the default template (I'll get to that in a min) is to drop the page, minus the header about 10px and narrow up the orange bar to 20px (its set to 30ish tall) so that the bar is smaller and goes just above the black navigation bar.

 

The reason we don't want to play with the rest of the page or navigation is because of the plugability that comes with WHMCS or adding new features when they come out. If we took a style and completely modded it to our liking, we would be re-developing a theme every other month which is an excessive expense of labor we can't bare.

Edited March 17, 2013 by leewells

[DennisHermannsen]

Your site is also working quite slow for me.

[vec]

did not load slow for me.. might be something other than your server, I'd do a trace to see what the pings are like

[Pixelior]

Amazingly slow for me as well, although your site look great!

[leewells]

Its likely your locations. The server and cloud is set to service those in the US. If you're from Europe, I imagine you're going to see a ton of latency.

 

Loaded slow for me, the site is nice, but the WHMCS intergration was a let down.

 

The WHMCS menu over the orange bar is horrid, I'd rather you removed it and make it look like a nice subnav on the orange.

 

The Footer was a let of it just looks to me like you edited the header.

 

I think you guys are reading past the topic: The integration was intended to be super minimal -- a demonstration of how well minimal integration can still give you the look and feel of your main site. When I say minimal, I mean the only CSS imported was for the menu bar and the header background/logo -- that is literally all of the integrations.

 

We again did not go for an extravagant integration -- we could very well had done this even by importing wp-head.php (our site is wordpress), but we wanted something we could change and stay on top of the WHMCs twitter style with a very quick and simple update.