Wahoo is, essentially, a content management system or CMS. There are many different website builder software products on offer ranging from free open source software website builders to very expensive and complicated, large enterprise systems. The open source offerings, like Joomla and Drupal, tend to be complex to set up because they have evolved using code written by several diverse people with a strong technical leaning. Some other free or cheap do it yourself website building programs are offered with advertisements or alongside website hosting packages and are usually fairly easy to use but lack the design and functionality expected of business websites. Some companies offer a base web builder product at a relatively low price but charge extra for things like additional pages and extra functions.  Some do-it-yourself website building programs have low - or no - initial charge and are paid for month by month like renting a site.  This is the SAS Software As a Service charging model.  Wahoo websites are charged as a one off payment for the CMS software with the hosting charged annually on top.  The only extra to this is optional email hosting for up to five email boxes for a similar amount to the web hosting charge. 

 

The guding principles of the Wahoo content management system are:

This page is an example of a stand alone page - it is reached via links on a couple of pages but not through a top level link (buttons along the top of the site) or any of the drop down menu links.  You can have 7 top level button thingies (plus the home page, of course) and each of these can have up to 8 pages in their drop down menus.  And then you can have as many of these stand alone pages (like this) as you like.  'War and Peace' - no problem.  Prouse's journals - well, probably not.

 

Because Wahoo was conceived and developed by graphic designers working closely with website developers, there has always been a strong sense of what makes good design and what doesn't.  What spoils the initial good, clean, structured design of many content managed websites is caused by people who tamper with those basic elements of design which lie at the core of the site.  Often, without intending to, someone thinks they will 'improve' something on the site by using a new colour not used elsewhere on the site - this is not a good idea, a site, like a room, should have a colour theme restricted to a few colours which form the pallete for anything introduced.  Or they - heaven forbid - make something flash or, worse still, rotate to draw attention to it.  Part of the design criteria of a well designed website will be a selection of sizes and/or weights of the typeface family - or font - selected for the various kinds of messages used.  These will often range from large, possibly bold major headings right down to small picture captions or credits in italics.  Websites built with Wahoo web builder will have had their initial styling set up by an experienced graphic designer that only ensures that the site is right for the business or company but also that it will stay right because, once the styling has been agreed, the designer will disable any extra features like colours and fonts which do not fit in with the site's corporate identity.  This not only ensures the site has a strong corporate feel running throughout each and every page, it also ensures no one can easily spoil this 'house style'.