Website CMS

Thanks for the quick replay, I have build the website using dreamweaver so I don't believe I can use wordpress to update the pages in, I think Joomla is my best bet right now. Is it easy to edit my pages in Joomla?

Would be great if my clients could make the changes to their sites in Wordpress or Joomla. Are there tutorials for this? Alot of designers use dreamweaver to design websigns but what if their clients prefer to make the changes to the site themselves instead of paying a fee everytime. This is something that i want for my business. Thanks

Thanks alot guys, ok lets say i want to use Wordpress as my CMS and want to put my existing templates that i designed with dreamweaver, how do i put them into wordpress?

NameLess is right on the money here.

Wordpress is a decent BLOGGING platform that has been modified as a faux CMS.

Joomla is a good cross between the simplistic Wordpress blogging platform and the robust Drupal platform.

Drupal (my CMS of choice) is excellent for building all types of websites (ever seen whitehouse.gov? it's a drupal site) from basic blogs to interactive social media sites.

Follow Namless' recommendation here...

Wordpress is a favorite among this website because of it's ability to create quick spam sites. You can have a wordpress site up and running in minutes. Even better yet you can feel (a false sense of) warm(th) inside knowing you installed the latest canned SEO plugin. Wordpress is nice for basic sites, but for a business site you should look deeper into a scalable CMS.

You are very misguided and misinformed. That is not true at all. Honestly, the majority of those use a custom CMS. Wordpress is not involved whatsoever. Just because you find a site claiming those MEGA sites are wordpress sites, doesn't mean it is true. They are spending a million on web maintenance a year. You think they are using wordpress? No.

No, you are doing good using Joomla. You aren't considered a script kiddie, and if you decide to sell web design services, people will take you seriously instead of only paying $20 for a wordpress site.

Drupal is great, not as user friendly as joomla, but wordpress users would have a very large learning curve for this.

Wordpress is for blogs. That is what its intended use is for. Blogs, and spam sites. You just haven't been able to use the other ones I assume, either that or it is over your head.

Plain and simple(words to describe wordpress), The wordpress platform can not do THAT much. In fact, I will challenge ANY designer and developer out there, to make a wordpress site, more robust than I can make a drupal or joomla site. In fact, I have a major magazine that is making the switch from wordpress to joomla because they can't have things implemented on wordpress.

I can skin, customize, and make a wordpress blog, into a full site within an hour or two. I can knock out 10 wordpress sites a day, fully featured, skinned and everything.

Think of your website as back links. You don't want garbage back links. You want something professional. Something that earns the users trust. Thing is, every word press site, looks like a wordpress site. You can't get away from it. If you aren't setting up a blog, or a spam site, then don't use wordpress. Have a bit of originality.

I was in the same boat you are a year or two ago. I had been designing all my sites with Dreamweaver, but clients started asking to be able to modify the sites themselves. I started using Adobe's solution, but then it went from free to expensive. I tried to quickly learn Joomla, but got frustrated. Same with Mambo, but Wordpress seemed to work better for me.

One of the challenges you will find is that you will need to totally redo the sites to make them fit into to CMS of any kind. You can't just plug and play.

My suggestion would be to take the next client who would like to update their website and have access to make changes, design using Wordpress (you can still use Dreamweaver and Fireworks in some parts). It will take you a bit longer, but it will be worth the transition.

One other thing to consider is after you complete a WP site for your client you will have to train them on how to use it. This can take more time expected (at least it did for me and my clients).

Let us know how it works out for you!

Theresa 8-)

Hi,

Another good alternative is PHPWCMS. It's really very nice and easy to use and customize. Try it out.

problem is i don't know alot of php (WP coding) so i'm assuming its going to be difficult to set this up and been able to to change the header, body and footer in WP. How do i make the transition from having the knowledge of working with html,css,and integrating it into a wordpress account. I'm quite a fast learner so are there video tutorials for this to show exactly how its done?

Also I want to have a link at the top of my site where my clients can login to manage/update there site etc. I have seen this on a lot of web designer sites and would like to have this feature. Please give us more information about this.

Thanks