Since I’ll soon be famous and everyone will want to know every minute detail of my progress with the site, welcome to part 1 of what will no doubt be a long and awe-inspiring look behind the scenes of it’s construction.
I came up with a colour scheme and general idea of how the site should look last week. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve come up with a colour scheme and general idea of how the site should look a few times before but this time I think I’ve cracked it.
Next up was deciding which platform, if any, to use. My options were:
Handcode it
Advantages
- Easier to create varied page layouts
- Lightweight end product
- Let’s face it, it’s just more fun
Disadvantages
- Blog section would need to be integrated
- Updating pages in the future would be more awkward
Advantages
- Blog is already using it
- If Carlsberg made admin panels they’d be just like this
- Easy to upgrade and make changes to site content/structure
Disadvantages
- Not the most flexible CMS in the world, in fact some say it shouldn’t even be called a CMS
Advantages
- Most flexible option for future expansion
- Views module means plenty of different content layouts
Disadvantages
- Upgrading can be, well, a nightmare
- With great flexibility comes great complexity
- drupal.org is a very very frustrating site to use
There are of course other options but these are the main three that were considered. In the end, since the blog was already using it and I’d forgotten how straightforward it is to theme, Wordpress won.
I don’t mean to sound like a Wordpress fangirl, but it really is an amazing bit of Open Source magic. The community is fantastic, as is the documentation, and the platform is so insanely popular by this point that what you can’t find on the official site is probably documented in at least 10 tutorial blogs just a quick google away.
So we have a colour scheme, a general layout and look for the site, and now a platform to build it on. It’s very exciting, no?*
*The answer is yes
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