As anyone who has seen how this site was made can tell, I love WordPress. Coding a site from scratch is an important thing to do…once. It’s really, really great to know how to tweak the HTML, the CSS, and the PHP to do what you want. And even better if you can just sit down and dash off lines of code effortlessly and quickly.
But in the real world, where everyone needs a website, and they need it now, cheap, and easily maintained. The way of the future for most small business owners is picking one of the big three content management systems – WordPress, Joomla and Drupal.
I would love to write a long post about each one, but most of my knowledge is in WordPress. I am passingly familiar with Joomla, and I know nothing about Drupal. I’d say I’m not that unusual. WordPress is the most user-friendly, the gateway drug of CMS’s if you will, and most people start there. Joomla is a bit more difficult but gives you a little more flexibility to make your site do exactly what you want. The trick is, there are far fewer themes and plugins and widgets – you are on your own a little more. As I said, Drupal I know nothing about, so I will shamelessly crib this from ITX Design:
“Drupal is an incredibly powerful framework that can serve as a solid foundation for virtually any type of website you can think of, however customization of that nature is best suited to more advanced users and developers…
The main reason for choosing Drupal over WordPress is the security, SEO benefits and management ability.
Even though it’s clear that WordPress has a much larger community around it than Drupal, there are still thousands of developers and over 8,000 modules to choose from. It’s not a small community, it’s just small in comparison.”
It is my opinion that a small business owner’s site should be a tool that s/he is very comfortable using. Gone are the days of making a website and ticking that off your to-do list, never to update it again. Your new business mostly comes from the internet, and the internet finds you through proper SEO techniques, and the greatest SEO technique is fresh, quality content frequently updated. Since most small business owners don’t have time to do learn to code, they need a site built on a platform that they can easily and quickly master, like WordPress.
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