Looks like WordPress is getting lots o’ love from me lately. I am building a site for the side business I am starting and have been battling with my options for a web platform. I thought about building from scratch, but I can’t say that I am THAT good. I have considered WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and others. But for some reason I ended up back with WordPress. Here’s the thing. WordPress is not exactly built to run as a static site, but it can run as a static site with the right template. Joomla and Drupal are also in that category. The great part about using a pre-built platform is that you have the ability to utilize all of the nifty tools others in the open source community build. Whether it’s some kind of home brew plugin or a widget from Google, your options are wide and plenty.
In the last month I have installed Drupal, then Joomla, then WordPress, then Joomla again, and finally last night I canned Joomla and installed WordPress again. Why all the fuss? Well, none of them have been a perfect fit.
I finally settled on WordPress for two reason. I am very familiar with the structure of WordPress and have become pretty efficient in my efforts to heavily customize my WordPress installs. Second, I found a REALLY good theme to start with for the site. The theme was the key. I was screwing around with a few graphics from a Joomla theme last night and I just wasn’t feeling it. It looked funky and the version I had installed, 1.5, was so new, very few sites had decent themes to choose from.
So anyway, WordPress is humming along and the new site for my business is in the works. Knowing me, the site will never be DONE, but I think that’s a good thing because people get bored with the same old sites. At least I do, maybe it’s just me…
I went with WordPress because it was easy to install – my host would put it on for me. I’m glad I did, though, because I’ve really found out how much more powerful the platform is, than say, Blogger for example.