Digital Media & Design

That can be an intimidating question, do I build my website or hire some else? Well my first response would be ‘Don’t build it yourself, hire me’ I could use the work, now while that might be good for me, if you don’t have the budget, it’s not good for you. You really need to ask yourself some questions, do I have the skills to learn and most importantly do I have the TIME. If you are a quick learner and have some descent computer skills and of course the time, then I say you can do it. There are a lot of good products out there now that make building a website a whole lot easier then it used to be, take for instance Joomla or WordPress, two very good CMS or Content Management Sytems that offer Templates or Themes that can help with site design and deployment and they are both FREE, yes that’s right I said FREE, that is they are both an Open Source Project and their basic software won’t cost you anything, just your time to learn them. Now WordPress started out as a Blogging software but I’m sure you have come across a lot of websites that use WordPress and didn’t even know it, they look like a regular website and not a blog. Joomla has emerged over the last couple of years as one of the most popular CMS software out there, I’m sure I would get an argument about which is the better Drupal, PHP-Nuke etc, as a mater of fact there are so many different ones out there it’s a little mind boggling. But I’m not here to argue about that, I just landed on Joomla, liked it and decided to stick with it and for me it works really well.

Now if you have any HTML or PHP knowledge, basically just enough to get yourself into trouble, then one of these CMS programs will be just the ticket. But be prepared to be frustrated, mad and perplexed. I still through a good ‘hissy fit’ now and then because there is a lot to learn, but if your up to it, it can be a very rewarding experience to see something you built on the World Wide Web.

So as I continue on in the next several week we’ll explore some of the important do’s and don’ts when it comes to building your own website.

Thanks for listening!