Blog or Website?
After several experiments with CMS/blogging platforms, I have come full circle. I began with a blog in WordPress.
Then I tried TypePad. Then experimented with a joomla! site. I've worked with a site built in DotNetNuke, as well as two
different sites built in GoDaddy's Website Tonight. My latest experiment has been building a client site in WordPress. With a traditional html site, you can create a test area and build the site in an off-line or password protected environment while working out the details. Not so easy with a WordPress site.
So, I sacrificed my own blog for a time. I purchased my own copy of the client's
desired template, and proceeded to slice it, dice it, widgetize it on my own blog site until client happiness ensued. Having worked out the
code changes, the revised images, installed some widgets that worked, I was able to quickly install the template on her site and swap
out the code.
Visually, it's pretty much done, now we are working on trying various widgets for additional functionality.
While there are many WP templates available, they still all manage to have a "templatey" look to them.
It's possible to customize them quite a bit (see below) but there are limits. Still, the ease and scope of user content management
possible makes a self-hosted WP site a very good choice for startups/small business/non-profits.
The original theme, GrungeMag, from Elegant Themes.  |
The theme as implemented on themoneyclubhouse.com site. Changes included altering the depth of the header region, widths of image/text in the wide post areas, lengths of caption truncation, and colors of navigation links. Some changes were easy to do, others required a good deal of experimentation and altering of multiple files to achieve a change that would have been a simple revise in an html site. The actual migration from a previous generic template did not cause a lot of disruption, since the changes had been tested elsewhere. A number of changes were made through the control panel to shorten the number of home page postings and links so the page would be more compact. The biggest challenge with this template is working with photos. As seen in the original template, the same thumbnail image is converted to a mildly horizontal shot for the scrollbar, then two different sizes of squares for the featured and random listings, and finally a very horizontal version for the random articles at the bottom. Very few photos work well with all these different treatments, and there is no individual control over how photos are cropped. If a photo will be too small in resolution at the designated size, the template just shrinks it (resulting in floating images as seen below). That's not necessarily a bad thing - some themes we tried would enlarge a photo to fit the space no matter how fuzzy it became. For this theme, the proportion of the photos in the wide postings was changed to match those in the scroll bar, to avoid awkward and bizarre cropping of future photos. |
The theme as implemented on my blog, Two Left Feet. Watch for this to change I implement my own look, now that the mission has been accomplished.  |
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