I tend to associate xpages with applications and tend to think its overkill for a "normal website". Consider the following 2 sites in domino I recently made live:
http://weatherbarrier.com
http://banyan-llc.com
These sites are what I consider "normal websites" in that they have common content associated w/ a lot of companies: static pages (eg about us, services, etc.), executive/employee profiles, testimonials, case studies, news, maybe a document library/white papers, a few forms, etc. I have a solid process for creating a site w/ a robust web based cms that handles all the components above and of course since its domino you can easily customize it. I'd be happy to share it w/ you. I suppose you could use xpages for your cms/admin interface but I would still likely not have the "front end" in xpages for following reasons:
-while I am sure you can find some code bloat on the above sites they are fairly lightweight and leverage jquery for features you often want to give your users: dropdown menu, galleries, clean validation on forms, nab lookups for secure section and more. Plus the spiders crawling generally like clean css/xhtml. Can you easily have a cleanly coded front end using xpages?
-the above sites easily allow users to manage seo components such as window title, url, h1 tags, meta tags and of course the content using http://ckeditor.com/ which I believe xpages uses. no idea if you can easily control url conventions in xpages but thats a must have for most sites that want to do well in seo.
In my opinion Domino has never been marketed or pushed as a platform for normal websites. In my opinion its an ideal one as "normal" sites are document centric and it has a strong future as long as you take the best stuff going on in open source and use hacks to get it working in domino which is what you've been doing for some time.
I tend to associate xpages with applications and tend to think its overkill for a "normal website". Consider the following 2 sites in domino I recently made live:
http://weatherbarrier.com
http://banyan-llc.com
These sites are what I consider "normal websites" in that they have common content associated w/ a lot of companies: static pages (eg about us, services, etc.), executive/employee profiles, testimonials, case studies, news, maybe a document library/white papers, a few forms, etc. I have a solid process for creating a site w/ a robust web based cms that handles all the components above and of course since its domino you can easily customize it. I'd be happy to share it w/ you. I suppose you could use xpages for your cms/admin interface but I would still likely not have the "front end" in xpages for following reasons:
-while I am sure you can find some code bloat on the above sites they are fairly lightweight and leverage jquery for features you often want to give your users: dropdown menu, galleries, clean validation on forms, nab lookups for secure section and more. Plus the spiders crawling generally like clean css/xhtml. Can you easily have a cleanly coded front end using xpages?
-the above sites easily allow users to manage seo components such as window title, url, h1 tags, meta tags and of course the content using http://ckeditor.com/ which I believe xpages uses. no idea if you can easily control url conventions in xpages but thats a must have for most sites that want to do well in seo.
In my opinion Domino has never been marketed or pushed as a platform for normal websites. In my opinion its an ideal one as "normal" sites are document centric and it has a strong future as long as you take the best stuff going on in open source and use hacks to get it working in domino which is what you've been doing for some time.