Ok, so you finally pulled the trigger and signed up with a webhost, got a domain name and now you’re ready to get your fancy new website up and running… So what platform are you going to use? Did you just look at me like I fed you a spoonful of worms?
Well lets start with what a platform is. Just like the word implies, it is what your website will sit on. There are many platforms out there ranging from plain old vanilla HTML web pages to using WordPress blogging software to fancy Content Management Systems (CMS) like Joomla. Here, we’ll discuss each of these platforms and briefly explain what they are and how they work.
HTML FILES:
HTML files are the great grand daddy’s of the internet. HTML is short for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is the original idea that gave us the ability to click on words (links) and have them take us to other pages and to make a page appear on the internet.
With HTML files, you manually write each page using either a plain text editor like notepad if you know HTML code or you can use a program like Expression Web which allows you to create a web page like a Word document by simply typing and dragging and dropping. Whichever way you use to create the page, when you’re done you save the page as a .html file and then you upload it to your website.
If you have a site that isn’t going to change often and isn’t going to be very large, HTML can be a simple solution, especially if you are using a program like Expression Web, which does all of the coding for you. You simply type the content you want, drag and drop pictures and files onto the page and then program generates the HTML code for you.
HTML can also be nice since you don’t need any other software or special configurations to make it work. You can literally save a copy of your website and upload it to almost any web server and it will be up and running almost instantly without any configuration or additional software.
HTML Code:
DRAWBACKS OF HTML:
Just like any old technology, HTML pages have drawbacks compared to more modern platforms. First of all, they are static, not dynamic. This simply means that once you create the HTML file and save it, it will not change again until you manually change it and upload it again. For example, let’s say you add another page to your website and you want the menu on all of the other pages on your website to have a new link to the new page. Well, you may end up having to manually edit everyone one of your pages and resave them, then upload them back up to your web server. This may not be that big a problem if you will only be updating your website a couple of times a year or you have very few pages, but once your website starts to grow or you need to update it more often, this can get very tiring and tedious, very quickly.
Coding is the next drawback of HTML pages. It’s all but a certainty that when working with HTML pages, you will find that you are trying to do something that requires you to start learning coding that goes beyond what even a fancy editor will do for you easily. You WILL end up needing to figure out coding and you will spend hours pulling your hair out trying to figure out why it’s not working. When you do finally discover that a misplaced comma is what cost you the last two hours of your life, you’ll question why you’re doing this. Coding is great for developers that do this full time, but if you have more important things to do, you’ll want to find something better.
WORDPRESS:
WordPress is an open source software package that was originally made for people to set up web logs or Blogs. Open source software is made by developers that believe that software should be free for all to use and improve upon. The great part about WordPress is that there are hundreds of programmers continuously improving it and it’s free. There are also thousands of people using WordPress that are usually happy to help other users with questions and problems.
One of the coolest things about WordPress is that, unlike HTML pages, WordPress is dynamic. This means that all of the content you create isn’t stored in static HTML files, but in a database. Even though the site appears to have HTML pages like a regular website, it actually doesn’t. When someone visits one of your pages, WordPress actually creates the page dynamically with all of your settings then adds the content from the database to the page. The real power of this comes when you want to change the look of your website or add links, etc… Instead of having to manually edit every page on your site, you change it in one place within WordPress and it magically changes on every page in the site.
Instead of spending all of your time tediously updating individual pages, you can spend it creating quality content.
This site is on the WordPress platform. While the orginal intent for WordPress was Blogging, it has evolved over the years to the point that there are many non blog websites that use the WordPress platform because of its ease of use and great, helpful community.
Once you have WordPress installed on your web server, the interface is super easy. If you want to put up a new post or web page, you just click “Add New” and an email type form comes up. Instead of Subject and body, it’s page title and body. You can choose all types of formatting for your text, upload pictures and even video and files without knowing any coding at all and without even having to separately upload your pictures and files like you would have to with HTML files. When you are finished typing, you just click the “Publish” button and BANG! – your new page shows up on your website.
See my page on using WordPress for detailed information and a walk through.
WordPress New Page Interface:
JOOMLA:
While WordPress was made for blogging, Joomla was made to be a Content Management System or CMS. This is basically a website on steroids. Joomla was primarily made for websites where you have a lot of new content or your content changes often and you have many people adding content. Imagine you were running a news website like Foxnews.com. You have 20 reporters adding news stories all the time and you need to organize and display all of that content quickly and easily. These type of situations is where a CMS platform really shines. Now that is an extreme analogy, as Joomla can be very useful for much smaller sites as well.
For me, I would use Joomla if I expected to have a website with a lot of different content and media as well as wanted to have a lot of people editing and adding pages.
The only real con to Joomla is that it has a much steeper learning curve than WordPress. You’ll have to spend a good amount of time learning Joomla before you can really put up a site and get it to look and act the way you want it to.
Before you can get started using any of these platforms you’ll need to learn how to work with files on your web server.
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