• Graphics / Html have never been my strong point. Sure I can cut and paste from other designs and cobble together something which resembles a web page, but they always look just that, cobbled together.
• It doesn’t get much traffic or provide much business value at present and hence I don’t want to have to pay a designer.

I had previously used iWeb and then up until recently rapidweaver, these applications are fine up to a point, but soon there lack of advanced features and template editing becomes apparent.  Between an application like iWeb and designing the site from scratch we have content management systems (CMS), the most popular being Drupal, Joomla and wordpress.

I had heard good reviews of Drupal before so this was my first port of call. I won’t go into detail about the setup, but it was overall fairly straight forward, however after that things went downhill. The admin panel was confusing and slow, I spent several hours trying to get the sites navigation and content to resemble something how I wanted. It seemed like every theme I tried ended up looking like the same boxy layout, you could immediately tell the site was using drupal. The themes were poor quality, difficult to modify and modules were complicated to install. After my drupal experience I gave up on CMS for a while.

Today I decided to give wordpress a shot. Since I already had php setup, Installation really was a case on unpacking the zip file and placing it in the apache home directory. I immediately went to install a new template. Wordpress features an automatic template installation system, however this is where I hit my first stumbling block. Wordpress kept asking for my ftp information, however a quick google search revealed my file permissions were wrong.

The following command did the trick: sudo chmod -R 777 /Path/To/Wordpress

Other than that templates where easy to install and I had found several decent looking ones in a few minutes. The next task was to add a contact page, unfortunatly wordpress doesn’t come with one as standard however the plugin “Contact Form 7″ was easy to install without leaving the admin interface. Even the more advanced task of separating the wordpress blog into two different pages (see The Loop) could be done without leaving the admin interface.

Overall I have been extremely impressed so, maybe I’ll run into customisation limitations again later, however at the moment I can’t praise wordpress enough.