Development of my website using WordPress as a CMS

Hey there. The development of this site has moved on a bit since my last post. Lets discuss…

I chose to develop this site using WordPress. WordPress is an open source Content Management System (CMS) and Blog Publishing Platform. My personal reasons for choosing this particular CMS were:

• It allowed me to quickly and easily set up a site with an admin section (Much quicker than me writing my own CMS framework).
• Very customisable – I can edit the layout very easily to how I please. I can just wrap my CSS around the WordPress code.
• Extendable. Lots of plugins are available for common features (photo galleries, contact forms etc). It saves time writing these from scratch.
• SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) Friendly.
• It’s very popular, there is quite a following of WordPress fans out there. This captured my interest I wanted to know what it was all about.
• Its also free!

I first found out about WordPress a year ago, but didnt have enough time to look into properly so had to put it on the back burner. When it was time to look into it I feel embarrased to say I didnt get it. Getting WordPress up and running is no problem, installing theme’s and plugins is very simple and straight forward. I did however find developing my own theme very difficult at first as I couldnt figure out how. I searched on the Internet for guides but couldnt find what I was looking for. So I ended up getting the WordPress for Dummies Book. I found it a very good read and gained quite a lot from it, especialy the know how on creating my own custom layouts using the CMS templating system.

Creating a theme using WordPress is infact very simple. At the moment I am using the default theme, but I am slowly customising it so it’s more personal. I did download the Starkers theme which is a completely stripped down layout that allows you to design a template from scratch, providing a blank canvas as apposed to editing an exising theme. Design isn’t my strong point though and the site was in the development stages for too long, so I have settled for the Kubrick theme for now.

I feel like I should of wrote a basic tutorial on how to edit a them to accompany this article but I think I will save it for a future post.

I have installed quite a few plugins on this site but will discuss these another time (Very soon I hope).

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 23rd, 2008 at 10:57 pm and is filed under Blogs, Plugins, Web Development, WordPress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.