Frontier: Web Site Development And CMS

First in a Series

Editor’s Note:

Never before in the history of human communication has it been so low a barrier and possible for writers and publishers to get their ideas out into the world. Technical barriers for stepping out into the Web world on your own require acquiring the know-how (or hiring and working with someone who has the knowledge) to handle some coding language and technical issues such as site hosting, as well as writing, editing and publishing. For those who relish a challenge and are self-motivated learners, it is not only possible, but utterly doable to learn online using tutorials and to learn by doing.

Packt Publishing is a leader in guidebooks that can fill in the gaps between for solo entrepreneurs. Based in the United Kingdom, the company’s books and online publications share the experiences of IT professionals in adapting and customizing today’s systems, applications, and frameworks. The range of information is easy to understand and features a series of guides stepped up from beginners to expert applications.

Packt (pronounced Packed) published its first book Mastering phpMyAdmin for Effective MySQL Management in April 2004. Five years have passed and the company has build a library of real life experiences, distilled in a digestible manner, easy to use and then apply.

Online forums can help provide guidance, but as with any frontier (and the world of Web 2.0 is a true frontier), sometimes it can be difficult to tell the good guys from the bad guys who can appear to be helpful (and their advice can prove fatal to a web site, but more of that in another segment of the series.)

Here is a question and answer session, accomplished online and remotely.

Three Packt authors offer up pithy advice for those seeking to venture onto solo entrepreneur status for publishing and handing a Web site. They are:

Tessa Blakeley Silver, whose background is in print design and traditional illustration.

Silver evolved over the years into web and multi-media development, where she focuses on usability and interface design. Prior to starting her consulting and development company Hyper3media (pronounced hyper-cube media). Tessa was the vice president of Interactive Technologies at eHigherEducation, an online learning and technology company developing compelling multimedia simulations, interactions, and games that met online educational requirements like 508, AICC, and SCORM. She has also worked as a consultant and freelancer for J. Walter Thompson and The Diamond Trading Company (formerly known as DeBeers) and was a design specialist and senior associate for PricewaterhouseCoopers’ East Region Marketing department. Tessa is a published author for Packt Publishing and has authored several books including WordPress Theme Design and Joomla! Template Design. She’s currently working on a new book, Joomla! 1.5 Template Design.

Vladimir Prelovac, founder of Cleveritics.com, author of WordPress Plugin Development: Beginner’s Guide book and popular articles about WordPress SEO, website optimization, customization, security and maintenance. Prelovac has considerable experience on WordPress and Magento (eCommerce software platform) related topics as a SEO consultant and Website optimization devotee. He actively uses WordPress platform as a base for Internet enterprise strategy for small & mid-sized businesses. For Vladimir, WordPress development is a full time job about which he happily blogs on his web site Prelovac.com.

Paul Thewlis, who has worked as a web communications professional in the public and private sectors, and is currently e-communications manager for a multi-national transport company based in the United Kingdom.

Thewlis began his online-based career as a technical editor, working on web design books for a well-known publisher. He has extensive experience of many content management systems, blogging platforms and has authored Packt title WordPress for Business Bloggers. He is an expert in the use of social media within corporate communications, and blogs about that subject, as well as WordPress and the Web in general, at http://blog.paulthewlis.com.

QU: For those unfamiliar with WordPress, what is the power of this platform for business- beyond blogging?

Tessa Blakeley Silver: “Well up front, it’s very easy to get your site going on WordPress. Even without worrying about design, you can get started immediately ‘out of the box’ using a default theme to start putting in content and organizing it into page hierarchies and post categories, figuring out your site’s architecture as you go along. There’s a very low learning curve with the admin panel which is one of the most intuitive I’ve come across in a CMS and if you add a little expert help with your theme, you can use posts and categories not only for a blog, but for a myriad of other creative uses for your business.

Vladimir Prelovac: “Although WordPress started out as a blogging tool, today it has grown into a fully featured website publishing solution. Still the main benefit of WordPress is it’s out of box ease of use for an average, not necessarily Internet savvy, user. The second factor businesses should consider when thinking about WordPress is built-in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) which allows WordPress sites to rank for competitive keywords on Google and other engines, equally or better than on other publishing platforms. Finally, corporate blogging has become very popular and WordPress blogs are easy to setup, run and maintain making them an ideal tool for the job.

Paul Thewlis: WordPress is open source – that’s where its power lies, from a business perspective. The licensing cost is zero. It really levels the playing field.

The rise of open source software means cost is no longer a barrier for entry into web publishing.

Businesses of any size can have a professional-looking web presence for next to nothing. Like any successful open-source project, the power of WordPress comes from the community that supports it. Millions of users all over the world provide support and development for free. The only investment needed is a small amount of time to learn the basics. Books like mine, along with the free community-developed documentation, mean that anyone with ‘office’ IT skills can have a great website up and running in a matter of days, even hours.

QU: As a content management system, how does WordPress stack up to Joomla?

Silver: Well, really, they’re simply too different to stack up. It’s an “apples vs. oranges” thing. WordPress in my opinion is “leaner” and more to the point. It has a much lower learning curve and your site’s architecture is a bit “locked in” to the system in certain ways. This can be constricting for some sites, but it’s also more instant and intuitive for getting a site rolling quickly.

For example, a user can create a static page, place in content and it shows up as a link in the page menu. Simple.

You have to intentionally set a page up to not display if you don’t want it in your navigation. I find this also facilitates easier collaboration in that you can have multiple people handle the site’s content without having to put too much emphasis on placing collaborators into a hierarchy, carefully watching who is in charge of what (though, that is always a best practice! I’m not saying you don’t need to organize your content team, you can get away with a loser team configuration with WordPress sometimes).

This means, the people (or person) in charge of the site don’t have to know quite so much about the more technical ins and outs of WordPress, or have a degree in developing web site architecture. Make a page and place it where it make “makes sense,” either as a top level or sub-level of some other page. You can then call your colleagues over and see if they agree. If they don’t, the page’s location and content can be easily adjusted and changed by just following the intuitive options and directions in WordPress’ admin panel. Hit “Submit” and the site’s navigation and architecture automatically reflects those changes.

With Joomla or Drupal, there’s a lot more power, yet huge learning curve and time lag in getting a site running because the site’s content management, navigation and architecture are completely separated out. It really helps to have one main person in charge of the site who really understands the CMS and the site’s pre-planned architecture with a clear hierarchy of managers and content contributor’s underneath that person.

Making a page and placing content in a Joomla or Drupal site is one thing, you then have to know enough about the system to connect that content to the front page, or a menu module.

To connect it, you have to have already set up the architecture of the menu’s and other modules, and understand how to organize the content with sections and categories etc. There’s just a lot more to it. Depending on your team and your site’s needs, Joomla and Drupal offer a lot more power and flexibility. From my experience as a freelance web developer, for about 95% of my clients, that power is complete overkill.

Where WordPress starts to break down, is when you need the site to do a whole lot more than handle posts, static pages and comments.

While there’s a ton of really excellent Plugins for WordPress, once a site really starts to grow and have a very large number of contributors, or if you need your site to handle user registrations/memberships for subscribed or restricted content, or if your site needs a lot of very special “applications” like robust forums, swap boards and multiple event calendars, It’s probably worth it to take the time to invest in a CMS like Joomla or Drupal. By invest I mean, take the time to learn the system, carefully organize a team so they all understand how to contribute etc. WordPress can take a company’s site quite far and quickly. So far, I’ve never had a client outgrow WP.

I’ve even moved a client from Joomla 1.0 to a WordPress rather than upgrade to Joomla 1.5 because they just didn’t need it. They are much happier.

Prelovac:

Joomla and other (CMS) like Drupal were developed before the modern, also known as Web 2.0, era of the Internet and as such do not provide interfaces to all the latest Web technologies (or provide them in a non-native way).

And because these years of development and changes, the learning curve for new users is much better on WordPress than on these older platforms.

Thewlis: WordPress and Joomla are two very different content management systems. Joomla was developed for managing large ‘portal’ websites, whereas WordPress provides a more straightforward publishing solution. To get the most out of Joomla, you need a good amount of technical know-how. It’s a CMS for CMS experts. WordPress was conceived as a ‘personal publishing platform’. It works straight out of the box as a powerful blogging solution and can be easily adapted to any kind of content management. Joomla is undoubtedly a more powerful product and is a worthy rival to many enterprise level systems. But it’s overkill for the web publishing requirements of most businesses. Unless you’re developing a complicated website with plenty of functionality, you just don’t need that level of complexity. The beauty of WordPress is its simplicity. It has an elegant, intuitive admininstrative interface that’s easy for even a novice to use. Joomla back-end is far more difficult to get to grips with.

To be continued . . . .

Packt books are well designed and feature jewel-like images on their covers.

Image excerpt of book cover, courtesy of Packt.