If you have visited my site before you are probably noticing some drastic changes and long overdue upgrades.
After years of being too busy to update my built-by-hand HTML site I have finally taken the advice I give to all my clients and moved the site into a database driven solution. Although it was a tough choice between Plone, Drupal, Joomla and WordPress I finally decided on WordPress.
One reason is that my site is small and basic and I wanted to demonstrate how nicely WordPress can serve as a content management system for simple sites like this. I have added a couple bells and whistles for usability and fun.
In the middle of this redesign, or more toward what I thought was the end really, WordPress released a new version that had me going back to the drawing board for a while since the plugins I had planned to use were not up to date and compatible with the new version. Needless to say I was not such a happy camper at first, but in the end I think the site is better for the changes.
For the curious and technically inclined, here’s a list of what I have used on top of WordPress 2.7:
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- Add to Any – powers “share this” so you can send a page to email or other sites.
- Akismet – an absolutely necessary comment spam blocker.
- Ax-sidebar – lets you post custom information in the sidebar
- Contact Form 7 -a nice simple contact form
- Executable PHP Widget – needed to get more control of the sidebars
- Flexi Pages Widget – great navigation tool for sub-sections
- NextGen Gallery– for management and display of the portfolio screen shots
- Post Tabs – nice inline tab tool
Its still not perfect and I hope to find the time between clients to keep improving the site but hopefully having a CMS and all the nifty plugins will result in making it easier to keep this site up to date and useful for my visitors. I have plans for expansion in the near future and am also starting up a Email newsletter that I hope folks will find useful and fun. Thanks for visiting and feel free to leave your thoughts about the redesign in the comments.
Good for you!
http://www.marketingfornonprofits.org/2009/01/eat-your-own-dogfood.html