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At first glance, Fire Rift is impressive. The CMS has set out to make life easier for developers by only managing your content via the CMS. No more hacking of your html and css to fit the limitations of your CMS’s templating system (often archaic and completely different across various other CMS’s.) With Fire Rift, you cut and code your psd and let Fire Rift take care of the content via css class names or javascript.

Meet the interface:

Creating content looks dead simple thanks to a back end that is hands down the cleanest I’ve seen from any other cms editor. See the overview video for more info.

Ahead of it’s time:

With every new CMS there are issues that may get in the way of fulfilling your project requirements. The biggest debate centered around Fire Rift is the questionable handling of content for SEO. The problem is that Fire Rift is a javascript based CMS. That means the actual content on the page relies on javascript to be displayed. Try a view source of this Fire Rift powered example page to see what I mean. Google’s search engine reportedly only has the ability to index content via an onClick event. Meaning google only sees your html framework sans the content from the CMS. This fact alone is the EPIC FAIL flaw of Fire Rift. It may just work against you when competing for top results against other server side CMS systems serving up similar content in the page.

In my opinion this is a great step forward for dynamic content. As many browsers focus on boosting javascript performance and treating the web as an app thus blurring the lines between desktop and cloud computing. But this CMS is not ready for primetime. Unless google finds a new way to index content via javascript (completely possible but not in the near future) or you go ahead and also serve up static content html pages (rendering the idea of a cms useless), I would consider it a beta idea that would be fun for designers/web developers to experiment with or use on sites that truly do not need to be spidered every day for content.

Garrett

User feedback collected from online site surveys indicated several flaws in the home page architecture of both Destination Kohler (Wisconsin and St Andrews) sites that made it difficult to access specific content. Featured content tiles were not self-evident and in many cases redundant with global navigation. Secondary and footer navigation needed to be reorganized, and the page needed to be optimized for search engines and tagged with Omniture code. Additionally, the business wished to do a better job telling the brand story and promoting specific content such as packages, book online, e-commerce and special events.

Our biggest challenge was in making strategic architectural and interface modifications without redesigning the entire site — since aside from the landing pages, site content was to remain unchanged. A primary goal was allowing users to book online at any time during their site visit. Since the interface was only 800 pixels wide, it was determined in IA that if we added a column to the right, we could stay within the standard 1024 display dimension, while housing a variety of ’support’ tools — including the persistent booking widget, 800 number and click to chat. In the interest of keeping this column efficient and the content apparent but digestible, we chose to employ javascript and reveal them one at a time interactively. This column is carried throughout the site, and was a relatively simple update for the technical team to deploy.

From a branding standpoint, DK wished to update the look and feel to make it more vibrant and contemporary. Garamond was the dominant typeface, and in addition to being difficult to read in navigational menus, it’s application said ‘conservative’. Avenir was selected as a clean sans serif alternative, with a wide variety of weights and legibility at small sizes. The color palette for both sites have also been tweaked and extended to reflect the two similar but different brand experiences. In redesigning the landing pages, the breadth of service offerings has been given center stage, sequencing through a variety of beautiful location photography within an embedded Flash movie. Simplifying the promotional spiffs and focusing navigational organization makes finding content easy, and browsing content rewarding.

Sometimes relatively small modifications to an existing site can make a big difference.

-TH