(Sorry this is a day late!) In the last two entries of this series, I discussed the basics of starting up and deciding what to do when it came to your design. After you’ve finished your design, or had someone else finish it for you, you need to choose what to do with it, how to make your visual idea become a functioning, interactive website. This article is specifically about choosing a style of website and a set of publishing tools that will work best for you.
Static website, blog, or CMS?
One of the things I’ve tried to do in this series is make you aware of your options and which choices you should consider for your own, individual situation. When it comes to maintaining your website, you have a few options from which to choose. This is an important choice, because having the appropriate type of site for your situation can save you lots of time, confusion and frustration.
Static Website
Static websites are named as such for a reason. They house little content that needs updating, and they tend to be easy on the interactive stuff; you won’t find much “community” on these sites that favor simple, direct information, above all else. This is a common website style for restaurants and traditional businesses (e.g., repair shops, hair salons, etc.), and it can work well if you’re in a situation where you just need to convey something quickly.
If your portfolio is not likely to change very often, I highly recommend you build or hire someone to build a static website for you. Also, don’t just assume that your content warrants a lot of development. Be realistic about your projects and portfolio. In the past, I’ve sometimes had clients become too excited about getting their website up, to the point that they wouldn’t take my advice about having a static website. Though a static website may sound sort of silly to have, it really isn’t if your content is not likely to change. In fact, choosing to publish a small site on the back of a blogging script or full-featured CMS will only cost you more time and/or money if a static site is all you need.
Blog
If a primary function of your website will be to have a blog, then I think you should choose a script that will specifically cater to that. You also need to make sure that the design you’ve made for your portfolio will fit in well with it.
Before you choose this path, make sure that blog maintenance is something that genuinely appeals to you. Maintaining a good blog that is updated at least somewhat regularly is difficult for a number of reasons. Blogging is one of those things that a lot of people like the idea of, but few can actually keep doing. It takes dedication. Some of the people I’ve designed for in the past, who just had to have a blog, have only updated a couple of times. They wasted a lot of time and money by asking for this development, only to not use it.
CMS
A CMS, which stands for content management system, is the option you should most closely consider if your site needs to be powerful and feature rich. If you have lots of data, plan to have an online community or maybe shopping, a CMS is what you need. A word of caution: There are many wonderful blog scripts out there today, and you most certainly can adapt them to work as a CMS, but this almost always takes more time to do than if you had used a CMS from the start. Be aware of this when starting out or hiring someone.
Blog Options
If a blog is what you’re after, there are numerous options for you: hosted (e.g., Blogger, WordPress.com, TypePad), open source (e.g., WordPress, TextPattern) and a few that are proprietary, though the latter you’ll mostly find packaged with a CMS (thus the cost).
WordPress is likely the most popular of them all. It’s used by many top bloggers and by bloggers in general. People use it most for a reason. It’s highly customizable and has a frequently-updated and improved administration panel. To provide an analogy, it’s the Firefox of blogging, right down to its extensive documentation and almost countless plugins. I haven’t really found any other open source blogging script that has the same level of support and extensibility. Using what’s popular sometimes has obvious advantages.
If you’re not convinced of WordPress’ quality or want to see some of its competition, check out the following websites:
- WeblogMatrix is a blog script comparison tool.
- The blog section on OpenSourceCMS has a review and rating system for open source blogging scripts, as well as an extensive demo installation setup, allowing you to try out a number of different scripts.
CMS Options
A complaint with using blogging scripts to power large websites is that the structure of the website tends to look like a blog, all throughout, even when it shouldn’t. While it’s true that it’s difficult to adapt blogging scripts to varied and sometimes interactive content, it’s not impossible, especially if the only dynamic part of your website is the text. That being said, you shouldn’t necessarily try it. I feel I made this mistake with my own website, particularly in the last year. I’ve had a lot of content on my site for a while now, and it’s different types of content: a blog, a portfolio with multiple kinds of art that needed to be styled differently, straightforward information pages. Each one needed its own styling and features. I managed to use WordPress as a CMS, but it had some major drawbacks, because, at its core, it was never intended to be used this way. Plugins forced it to do the things I wanted, but it was a constant hack job, particularly with custom fields.
If you are like me and have lots of content, particularly content that needs varied styling, then a CMS is probably what you should look into. It will come out of the box with a lot of features that you would have to really work hard to create with a blogging script. Also, if you are concerned about having your website get stuck in a simple blog design, a CMS may help you think more creatively, just because of its raw structuring, although this isn’t always true.
As of this year, I use ExpressionEngine to power this website. I’ve worked with several CMS scripts now, and I think it’s the most powerful I’ve encountered. It’s similar to the open source CMS Drupal, but maybe a bit more structured. I’m probably most satisfied with ExpressionEngine’s handling of custom fields, which completely dwarfs any blogging scripts’ attempts to do the same thing.
A major problem with CMS scripts is their learning curve. I’ve yet to find a CMS that didn’t require me to really sit down and start from scratch, leading me to read pages and pages of documentation. Some things overlap between systems, but much depends on core concepts that can vary greatly, even if the programming language stays the same. Using a CMS to power a website is not for the faint of heart, and unless you’ve had some experience with using a CMS before, come from a web development background, or aren’t taking your portfolio with immediate seriousness, I would recommend hiring someone else to build things up for you. As I’ve said in the entry before this, freelancers can be good for this sort of thing.
If you think a CMS is what you need, check out the sites below to help you determine which system is best for you:
- CMS Matrix (Warning: Expect information overload.)
- CMS Ratings and Reviews on OpenSourceCMS
- Wikipedia’s List of Content Management Systems
Summary
Choosing the right method of publication, as well as the right publishing tool, not only saves you time, but it will work better for the clients who visit your portfolio. If one looks closely enough, it’s almost always obvious when someone is using a system in unintended ways. Know what you want by looking at your design and content ideas, then choose a publishing tool. You want something that will work for you more than you’ll work for it.
Next week, I’ll talk about building a usable portfolio.
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Tagged under: new-media, technology, series-building-a-portfolio
1 Comment
Web Design Company on Jul. 21, 2009 at 07:55pm
Indeed, some websites can not be built on CMS systems, but let’s face it, most websites that people need can be built on WordPress, Joomla, Mambo, etc and provide more than is really needed. Plus that you find a lot of ways to extend such a platform, like plugins, themes, a fan community, a developer community, everybody and everything just to help you. So, unless you really need a custom solution for your site, you will probably be safer with a CMS
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