The Secret to Cheap and Easy Websites
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Ok, you’ve got an idea and it needs a home on the web. You don’t need much but you don’t know where to start. So you call your friend who is a web designer. She of course decides you need a programmer. By the way, did she mention her hourly rate and oh yeah, she’s got a friend who does hosting. Your four or five little pages just grew into a two week project with a deposit.
Now, I’ll share a secret with you that I’m sure will piss-off the programmer’s guild; WordPress can be used as a simple CMS.
Here are the five magic steps to web freedom.
- Get a hosting account with someone you trust and not the one that gives your designer friend a kickback.
- Grab Wordpress form wordpress.org and follow the five minute install.
- Google for “Free Wordpress Themesâ€, pick one you like and install it.
- Log in and write your content as Pages, not posts. You will understand when you see the admin interface.
- In the Admin Interface, select “Options->Reading†and tell it that the front page should be a static page and which page you want to be the front page.
There, you’ve got your new site, no designer, no programmer and no deposit.
My name is Cal Evans and I am your Sixty Second Tech.
Cal Evans on March 2nd, 2008 | File Under Uncategorized | 1 Comment -
March 28th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
@SpaceNinja,
(Regarding the comment over on iTunes)
I do respect how this episode could be interpreted as telling people that they don’t need a designer; however that was not the intent. (It is a shortcoming of the 60 second format that I can’t cover the topic in the depth that it sometimes deserves.)
I think that both designers and programmers are not only necessary, they are important. However, I also know that there are times when people just need to get something up there. I’ve seen too many designers and programmers – both professional and amatuer – miss what a client was saying and deliver a project that while beautiful, feature rich, missed the point of what the client needed, which was simple and NOW.
Wordpress makes an excellent, simple CMS. There are many plugins available for it and lot of free and not free themes. It makes a great platform to get up and running on. In almost every case where I’ve deployed Wordpress and a free skin, the client has wanted to spend a few dollars extra and have a designer step in and create a custom theme. I’m always happy to point them in the right direction.
In the interest of total disclosure, I’m married to a web designer, the lovely and talented Kathy, so it’s a real bad idea for me to be too hard on designers. :)
Thanks for the comment, I hope you will continue to listen and if you’ve got further comments, feel free to post them here we everybody can discuss them.
=C=