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Building Your Own Website - Part 4

Sun, 06/03/2007 - 05:01 — imft

I am going to show some resources where you can build websites from scratch but expect a considerably steep learning curve before jumping on.

But this will pay off nicely with the flexibility

you have in deciding the look and feel of your site way beyond out-of-the-can site builder systems.

The good news is that you don't have to start from ground zero as there are many systems that are ready to propel you from a good starting point. These systems are typically called Content Management System (CMS).

Drupal

This is my personal favorite for CMS. It is available free-of-charge from Drupal website:

http://www.drupal.org/

It is an open source product which means it's licensed to you free of charge. If you're adventurous, the source codes are also available for you to modify as per your liking.

There are numerous settings that you can administer so that your website can be tailored according to your design requirements. Customisation possibilities are endless and here are only a few examples:

  • choose from hundreds of themes (a.k.a templates, skins, styles...)
  • use contents sush as blogs, stories, forums and pages
  • mix-and-match hundreds of core and contributed modules to cater for features like Google Analytics, spam filter, bookmarking, videos plus lot others

The system is based on PHP and MySQL platforms so make sure your hosting can support exactly these before embarking on the project. If necessary you may want to change your hosting instead.

There are plenty of supports for Drupal web design and development both on official Drupal website and independent ones. One thing I love so much is that the Drupal community willingness to help each other is simply superb.

I personally had some teething problems when setting up my sites using Drupal. I owe it to the help of other Drupal developers and users to push me through and had my first Drupal site up and running.

One Drupal feature among so many that I would like to highlight here is the ability to construct many sites with just a single Drupal "codebase".

One advantage is that you only have one set of codes to worry about whenever there's a need to upgrade. Adding features to several sites also mean uploading a module only once. Talk about high efficiency here.

Be warned that there's so much to explore in Drupal as much as you're willing to do it.

Shown below are books related to your Drupal learning.

For Drupal basics I recommend you to get this book:

This is a good book for advanced users:

 

CNet Webware 100 WinnerYou might want to know that Drupal has won Webware Top 100 contest. See full report here:

http://www.webware.com/html/ww/100.html

 

 

 

Joomla

Joomla is another popular CMS worth considering. You can access the whole system here:

http://www.joomla.org/

A book you can refer:

Is it all there is once you have a website? The answer is a big NO! It is just a beginning as there are more to be done if you want traffic and other goals of yours.

 

Next: How To Drive Traffics To Your Site?