TheWayoftheWeb

Whether you’re aiming to build a site for the absolute minimum budget, or investing millions, there are rules which apply equally.
Some seem so obvious that you’d be amazed how many times I’ve seen them ignored, even on the biggest projects. I’ve even managed it myself, bursting my ‘holier-than-thou’ attitude somewhat!

The most important aspect of building a website for me is the opening stage. It’s the point where you define your mission, and you pick the Content Management System (CMS) and a host.

You need a clear, simple, defined mission statement.

You need a CMS system that you are comfortable with. And that has some type of reliable support network for coding questions at 3am.

You need a reliable hosting service.

Without these three things, you’ll always be fighting an uphill battle, no matter how big and impressive your site may be. If you’re on a budget, you can still shop around, with the likes of Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress giving you free or open source methods of building a site. They all have advantages and disadvantages, and the best way to discover the right system for you , is to actually trial the thing. Only you know the methods you are most comfortable with.

Not only is it free, but it’s a darn sight easier to decide on a CMS before you fill a site with content, rather than changing six months later…

I’m currently looking at embarking on some new web projects, with both blogs and websites playing a part. And I know that the sites will be based on home coding and open source applications…(I was going to say cheap, but the labour and time involved definitely isn’t cheap).

I’ve had a look at various CMS systems etc, but I’m struggling to find any examples of really interesting design. It seems if you lock into a system like Drupal, you’re able to modify templates etc, just as you would here, but no-one seems to radically change things about, or hide the CMS behind a custom-coded main page etc?

DO you know of any such sites? They can use Drupal, Joomla, DotNetNuke or any other Open Source alternative you can suggest…