Pros

• Absolute control of the cost. If your budget is $0.00 and you have a lot of time on your hands this may make sense
• This allows you to exercise your creative talents which can be a reward in itself.
• Your site will look and feel exactly the way you want it to look.
• If you must have it done right now this may make sense.

Cons

• A poorly designed site looks amateurish and may turn away customers.
• Site navigation may not allow your customers to find what they are looking for.
• Web design requires a complex skill set including the use of HTML tags, search engine optimization and tools.
• Profession web design tools can be expensive.
• You have to know how to upload your site and any changes via FTP.
• The learning curve – if you don’t know what you are doing it might never get done.

Tools

Tools can be broken down into 3 categories: Page or HTML Editors, Graphic Design Programs and Publishing Tools. There can be overlaps in some of the tools like Page Editors and Publishing Tools. The following lists include both free and commercial tools
.

HTML or Page Editors

• Komodo Edit $0.00 – While this free and open source editor makes writing code easy it may not be the best tool for a beginner.
• CoffeeCup HTML Editor $0.00 to $49 – Designed for those getting started in Web Design the free version is only a text editor. To get the full WYSIWYG experience you need to purchase the Full Version CoffeeCup HTML Editor
• SeaMonkey all-in-one internet application suite $0.00 – Supported by the Mozilla Foundation SeaMonkey includes a browser, mail client and web design tools.
• Amaya Web Editor for WIndows, Mac and Linux $0.00 – Hosted by W3C the organization which sets the standards for Web Design and Applications.
• Adobe Dreamweaver $399 – This is the most popular web development tool with professional web designers.

Graphic Editors

• Photoshop $699 to $999 – The tool of first choice for graphics artists.
• Adobe Illustrator for the Web $599 – A professional tool for designing vector graphics.
• Paint Shop Photo Pro $99.99 – Many designers start with this tool and then upgrade to Photoshop. There are many tutorials available for using it for web site graphic design.
• Free Graphics Software list at About.com

Publishing Tools (FTP Software)

• FileZilla $0.00 – This is what we use when we need to FTP pages outside of our development environment. The price is right and it does everything most web designers need. Versions for both Windows and MAC are available.
• Comparison of various other FTP software at Wikipedia

Skill Sets – Learning how to do it

The following list gives links to several websites which provide HTML design tips, tutorials and advice. This list is not complete and will probably be added to as time goes on.

• Getting started with HTML
• Web Design Basics at About.com
• w3schools free tutorials
• W3C Web Design and Applications
• Smashing Magazine
• Net Tuts+ Tutorials
• Web Designer Wall – Tutorials
• A List Apart

This is too much for me!

Overwhelmed by all this? We can help you with small changes to an existing site, a design of a new site or a complete redesign of your existing website. Contact contact our Help Desk and let us know what needs to be done. Someone will get back to you within one working day to provide a free quote.

No related posts.

Once you have WordPress installed and setup as a both a CMS and blog you need to think about your website design, Look and Feel. There are several ways to go about this, but they all start with your deciding what you want your site to look like.

If you already have a website and just want to move it to WordPress as a CMS you will need to create a theme for it, which is a little beyond the scope of this article. The WordPress.org site offers substantial theme documentation.  If you need assistance with this we have web designers that can do it for you, just contact our helpdesk. If this is a new site design your job is a little harder as it takes time and effort to decide how you want your site to look. Luckily there are resources out there that make your job easier as many sites provide WordPress themes at little or no cost.

Some WordPress theme resources:

• The WordPress Site – over 1,200 themes to choose from
• WordPress Lover’s Site
• Free Theme Layouts
• Google Search – Free WordPress Themes

Related posts:

1. Word Press as a CMS (Part 1)
2. WordPress as a CMS? Maybe, maybe not. (Intro)

I am going to assume you have WordPress installed on your virtual server which can either be done via the control panel or manually.  This posting is focused just on setting up WordPress as a workable CMS and a blog. I am not going to delve into plugins, the template design, menus or other Word Press settings.

1. Create a page called “Home” which will be your website’s main or home page.

   

   By way of example, if you were to browse directly to our Linux Virtual Private Servers site using just the URL: http://www.linux-virtual-servers.com the “Home” page will be displayed.

2. Add a second page called “Blog” which will act as a placeholder for your blog, which will then be located at:

   http://www.yoursitename.com/blog/

3. Next you have to tell WordPress what pages to use for your CMS Home Page and also where the blog is located.
   1. Under Settings select “Reading.”
   2. Click the “Static Page” radio button.
   3. Select “Home” for the FrontPage.
   4. Select “Blogs” for the Posts Page
   5. Click on Save Changes.



WordPress will now display the “Home” page as your sites “Home” page.
It will display your blog entries at:  /blogs/

4. There is one more step needed, which is to set your permalinks custom setting.
   There are several options which can be used, such as:
   /blog/%postname%
   or
   /blog/%category%/%postname%
   or
   /%category%/%postname%
   There is a link at the top of the Permalink Settings page to that shows many other options.

This is really all there is to it, your Word Press install is now both a CMS system and a Blog. To add pages to your site just create a new page and publish it.

Related posts:

1. Word Press as a CMS (Part 1)
2. WordPress as a CMS? Maybe, maybe not. (Intro)

When I was first told that one could use WordPress as a CMS I was thinking inside a very small confining box and thought, “why in the world would anyone ever want to do that?” The basis for this thought was totally from a narrow minded security point of view, “here we go, yet another web application that will allow sites to be hacked, servers to be owned and more sites taken over by spammers and hackers.”

Luckily I don’t live in that box, so I quickly stepped outside of it and started looking at the benefits of using WordPress as both a CMS and a blog. I also wanted to see if we could use WordPress as a CMS for a new site we wanted to launch that was just for our Linux Virtual Private Servers. As with everything there are tradeoffs and risks as well as benefits so let’s start with the 10 benefits of using WordPress as a CMS.

10 Benefits of using WordPress as a CMS

• It’s free – unlike some CMS platforms it is free and well supported by a large group of developers and users.
• It is easy to install and setup.
• It is easy to learn – you can edit pages without knowing HTML. Easier to learn than some CMS systems.
• It runs on both Apache (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) and Windows IIS.
• The cost of the actual site design can be controlled by using free or low cost templates.
• It is fairly easy to take an existing design and move it to WordPress as the template system is well designed.
• Many plug-ins are available allowing you to do things like SEO, generate sitemap files, include multimedia like Flash, Videos and music.
• Captchas can be used to prevent spamming of the blog.
• No need to use FTP or other tools to update your site.
• The WordPress team is interested in security and not only makes regular updates to WordPress but they also make it easy to update both the base platform and plug-ins.

Why not to use WordPress as a CMS

There are good reasons not to use WordPress as a CMS system, here are a few that you might want to consider, before you read my conclusion below.

Five Reasons to avoid using WordPress as a CMS

• WordPress was designed to be a blogging platform, so some hard core developers feel that adding CMS capabilities to WordPress is like turbo charging an Edsel.  It’s still an Edsel when you are done. This does not mean that doing this is bad it just limits the capabilities as WordPress is designed for use in a  single user/blogger environment. If you need multiple authors, extremely flexible categorization of content or a complex site WordPress might not be the best solution for your needs.
• Simple Page/Post/User configuration. In software designed to be CMS systems from the start allow more posting options and the ability to setup multiple users with different levels of access.
• Simplified permalink options which force you to a set link structure.
• WordPress lacks editorial process and workflow controls.
• WordPress may be overkill. If you only need to edit the content on one page there are scripts that will do that with a lot less overhead than WordPress or any other CMS.

When I was in high school the guys in auto shop always seemed to get into a debate as to what was the better car, a Ford or a Chevy. As both sides wore blinders they couldn’t see the other side’s viewpoint and refused to be swayed to the other side. The bottom line is that you are running a business you want to survive so you cannot afford to wear blinders. You have to make decisions that affect your bottom line, your employee’s livelihood and your customers. You also cannot make decisions to embrace a new technology just based on its “coolness” factor. You need to evaluate the features available in WordPress and decide if they meet your needs for near future. If it does, then use it, if not find a better tool that does the job you need done.

Related posts:

1. Word Press as a CMS (Part 2)
2. WordPress as a CMS? Maybe, maybe not. (Intro)

Sitting on a Fence

Overview – Many web designers are looking at or currently using WordPress as a Content Management system for their clients. As with any technology there are trade-offs that must be considered. In order to explore this more fully we decided to implement a new site devoted to our Linux Virtual Servers in WordPress. This gave us an opportunity to look at this technology from a different point of view and evaluate it with regards to the following areas:

• Investigating using WordPress as both a CMS and blog.
• WordPress Setup.
• Ease of initial website design and implementation.
• User generated content.
• SEO
• Site performance.
• Daily Maintenance
• Security

In part 1 I’ll cover using our investigations into using WordPress as a CMS and what is required to use WordPress and our design constraints.

Related posts:

1. Word Press as a CMS (Part 1)
2. Word Press as a CMS (Part 2)
3. WordPress as a CMS (Part 3)