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  • #24825
    jbope
    Participant

    I have built a site that the client needed quickly and so I built it static even though I know the client needs to have editing ability. They have a couple of possibly blog-like pages and then other pages that they need to edit as well. I have no experience here, I am a designer just learning HTML/CSS/PHP. I am hoping someone will give some advice on the easiest/best way to go from here. I don’t want to try/learn several different blogging/CMS solutions (adobe incontext, cushyCMS, wordpress, drupal, dreamweaver templates, etc) just to learn that they are not the best way to go. I don’t need the whole site to be built on a CMS platform unless that is the best way to go.

    The site is here <www.alortho.com> and the pages that need to be client editable include

    (blog-like although I don’t need most of the blog functionality just making it so that there are only a set number of entries before going to the next page)
    <http://www.alortho.com/bonebreak.php&gt;
    <http://www.alortho.com/orthominute.php&gt;

    (pages that are more of a template so that the client can add another page just like it with small changes to content)
    http://www.alortho.com/financial-counselor.php

    Thanks for any input on this,
    Jeane

    #57515
    AshtonSanders
    Participant
    "jbope" wrote:
    I don’t want to try/learn several different blogging/CMS solutions (adobe incontext, cushyCMS, wordpress, drupal, dreamweaver templates, etc) just to learn that they are not the best way to go.

    Unfortunately, there is not a "best way to go" for everything.

    If you’re looking for something extremely simple and easy to work with, do WordPress. It takes 5-10 minutes to install and comes ready to go. If you know how to include headers, sidebars and footers into a web page (which is pretty basic), the WP templating system is beyond easy, and comes ready to work with. It is primarily a Blogging software, but it does have Pages section to create webpages.

    Joomla is a little more complicated but is an actual CMS. I’ve heard this a great system, although it seems tempermental to me (I may just have some crappy plugins…).

    Drupal seems to be way more extensive. It takes about 30 minutes to install if you’re used to it, and then you add in all the plugins you want (like rich text editor, etc.)

    As you can probably guess, I know more about WP than the others. I’ve used it for most of my small business websites. Based on the functionality of your website, I would totally use WordPress. Here’s a slightly similar website I built in WP; http://www.johndontje.com/

    Hope that helps.

    #57518
    jbope
    Participant

    Ashton,

    Thanks for the info. Sounds like WordPress is the way to go.

    -Did you build that site completely in WordPress?
    -Is it OK to just do the blog sections and leave the rest of the site static to save time in rebuilding every page. Or will that cause problems with the menu linking and such?

    #57519
    AshtonSanders
    Participant
    "jbope" wrote:
    -Did you build that site completely in WordPress?

    Yes, that entire site is in WordPress. The client can edit every page on the site.

    "jbope" wrote:
    -Is it OK to just do the blog sections and leave the rest of the site static to save time in rebuilding every page. Or will that cause problems with the menu linking and such?

    It will definitely work.

    I don’t know how you make "static" web pages, but you will need to convert your website design into a WP template. If you already have your website on an include template system, you should be able to just transfer over your header, footer, sidebars, etc. into the existing WP template (which by the way is in "/wp-content/themes/*template folder*/").

    When you make changes to the site in the future, since you have two templates, you’ll have to make the changes to both templates.

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