I am a small business owner who needs to get started with a designer to build a new, functional website. My business is video and photography.
I have been surprised that I have not been able to find any introductory information on which TYPE of platform (if I am using the right terminology) to go with. I am NOT interested in learning how to build the site - I want a pro to do that, but I would like them to be able to hand off to me at completion, showing me to how to add content to the site on a perhaps twice-monthly basis.
There’s plenty of ‘within-application’ material out there, but it’s harder to gain the wider approach of sorting the wood from the trips.
In searching through previous sitepoint forums for possible existing answers, I did find this closed thread posting : “WORDPRESS, DRUPAL, or JOOMLA for a corporate site”
My ongoing, regular contributions would be :
- Articles (blogs, etc)
- Samples of new work - video clips, photos
My key goals are to :
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Launch a truly elegant, pro site. It does not need to be large, nor complex. It has to look very good.
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Have the site be as efficient and simple a user experience as possible (a lot of my clients are harried and have short attention spans. They need to ‘get in/get out’). Fast loads, navigation tools locked into place on screen as much as possible, etc.
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Have sufficient understanding that I can be pretty much in charge of clean, elegant looking updates to content, knowing also when it’s time to go back to the design team for the more structurally-oriented changes.
I’ve gone as far as doing wire-frame mockups of my proposed new site, and have
worked my way through the tutorials here : http://codex.wordpress.org/Main_Page
Can you help me understand which platform/software is the best approach? I have been able to glean that WordPress started out as blogging software, but has been able to take over the functions of a basic site such as what I would need. With that in mind, is this the model I should be requesting?
I consider this THE front-end issue. If I get this wrong, I could be faced with a total teardown-and-rebuild of the site at some point in the near future. Naturally, I’d hope to avoid that!
Thank you.
Grant.