Building Your Site

Founding a web-based business is often viewed as easier than constructing a brick-and-mortar store.  In many ways, this holds true, but in some ways, making your decisions online can be a lot more difficult.  For one thing, we feel as though we should be able to handle everything ourselves in an online business.  Most people wouldn’t try to hand-build a store single-handedly, but building a website by yourself seems like a lot more feasible of a proposition.

Building your site can seem like a daunting task, especially if you’re on a tight budget.  Sure, you can spend lots of money and create an elaborate site, but this is absolutely not necessary.  There are ways to build sites for free, and the price goes up from there.

First and foremost, identify any skills that you possess.  Are you a good graphic designer?  If you are, you can eliminate any design costs.  Do you know a lot about coding?  If you do, then you might not need to hire a web coder.  Really, anything that you can bring to the table eliminates the cost associated with outsourcing that particular skill.  If you have a friend who had the necessary skills, it might be worth your while to bring him or her onto your project.  Free or cheap templates are also a fairly good investment, as they can save you a lot of time and effort.

While you always have the option of paying someone to custom-build you a content management system (CMS), most projects can be accomplished easily with a pre-existing CMS.  The most popular of these are WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla.  We’ll take a look at each one below so you can get an idea of which is right for you.

WordPress

WordPress was built primarily to be used as a blogging tool, but it’s since grown into a much more versatile engine.  It’s great a great tool if you’d like something simple and user-friendly.  Installing it is literally as easy as uploading it onto your server, hitting a link, and filling out a couple of fields.  Adding posts is just as easy and can be done through a WYSIWYG editor.  Pretty much anyone can just pick it up and run with it.

Visually, you can’t do quite as much with WordPress as you can with Joomla, but that’s not to say a WordPress site can’t be pretty.  There are tens of dozens of resources that list free WordPress themes, and there are quite a number of good pay-for-theme resources as well.  It might take a bit of searching, but you’ve got lots of options.

My only hesitation in recommending it as a good go-to solution for every basic site is that it is not developer-friendly. If you are thinking of customizing anything, think again.  It’s definitely possible, but you always run the risk of breaking your entire site, and no one wants that.  Along the same lines, WordPress updates sometimes contain more bugs than fixes.

For the beginner or anyone looking to get a site up ASAP, WordPress is your best bet.

Drupal

If WordPress is not developer-friendly, Drupal is the exact opposite.  In fact, I’d almost go so far as to call it developer-centric.  In other words, if you don’t know a lot about programming, either be prepared to hire a programmer or stay away.  Say goodbye to the friendly WYSIWYG editor of WordPress and hello to lines of code.  But with increased complexity comes greatly increased flexibility.  You can edit pretty much anything, creating surprisingly advanced websites if you (or a developer) puts in the time.  You can even run multiple sites off of one database/backend.

From my experience, Drupal sites will not be winning any beauty contests.  Just peruse the themes section of drupal.org, and you’ll feel as though you’ve warped back five years in web design.  Clearly, Drupal’s raw horsepower is muted somewhat by its appearance.

If you need an engine that’s capable of handling complex web ideas, Drupal trumps both WordPress and Joomla.  But if you’re looking for elegance and simplicity, Drupal probably isn’t the right choice for you.

Joomla

Joomla, in my opinion (and the opinion of many web designers), offers the prettiest face.  Joomla websites can look stunning with a simple template and a few tweaks.  While I can glance at a website and usually tell if it was built using WordPress or Drupal, a cursory glance will only tell me that a Joomla site is pretty (assuming it’s a good site), not that it was built using Joomla.

It’s more powerful behind the scenes that WordPress, but it lacks many of the underpinnings that makes Drupal such a powerful tool.  It sits in between WordPress and Drupal in terms of customizability.  In the case of WordPress, just about anyone can pick it up and use it.  In the case of Drupal, very few people can just “get it.”  Joomla is not quite as user friendly, but if you put some time into learning it, just about anyone can use it.

If you’re willing to spend a bit more time, and WordPress won’t mold itself to your idea, Joomla is an excellent choice.