My Favorite Website Platform

by Chad Miller /// October 4th, 2007

There are more websites than ever out there in the vast realm of the internet. Everyone seems to have a website, from the largest companies in the world to the smallest and most eccentric communities built around the weirdest interests you can imagine.

Most websites are built for one purpose: to communicate information. Every other function of a website is generally going to be a subset of this singular purpose. This can of course be refined to target a particular audience, communicate an intended message, and use selected medium/media, but in the big picture, this is all communication.

And communicating information over the internet using a website has never been easier, as more and more tools are developed which help people to build websites (many of which require very little technical knowledge). Now some of these will produce better sites than others, depending on what you want out of your site, but today I’m going to tell you exactly what platform I recommend for building small- to medium-scale websites.

Content Management System

A Content Management System, or CMS, is almost certainly the way to go with a website if you think any of the information on the website is ever going to change. Even for websites that I build and maintain myself, that no one else will ever have to change, I will always use a CMS.

That’s because a CMS does one key thing that is absolutely vital for any website whose information is ever going to be changed, updated, or amended by a human being:

It separates the content from the presentation of the content.

This is such a vital factor because otherwise the human being is going to have to dig through piles and piles of HTML computer code (the code that dictates how a webpage is laid out) to find the little section where the information needs to be changed or added. Even for a computer geek like myself, who thinks in HTML, that is quite a large and time-consuming task.

There are plenty of other perfectly reasonable, technically sound reasons for keeping your content and your presentation separate, but for me these reasons are all second to the time I save by being able to just go in and change or add whatever I need to without worrying about the code or technical details.

The CMS I Use

My favorite Content Management system is WordPress, and it has been for quite some time. WordPress started life as a fork (geek-speak for ‘Divergent Copy’) of a blogging system called B2.

WordPress was itself considered a blogging system (and nothing more) for quite a while, until it evolved into the robust CMS platform it is today. In fact, I have built more than one website managed by WordPress that don’t have any blog elements at all.

Here are some of the many reasons I use WordPress over just about everything else:

• Open Source License. Yes, this means it is free of charge.
• Broad User Community. Anything I want to do with it has probably already been done, and someone can tell me how. If not, I can figure it out and tell other people.
• Easy Setup. WordPress is available as an easy 1-click install from every web host I’ve ever used, so there’s no getting down into the gritty details of FTPing packages or setting up your database; this can all be done for you with the click of a mouse.
• Abundant Themes. Since the WordPress user community is so broad, there are already hundreds (if not thousands) of already-built site themes, so if you don’t want to get into the computer code, you still have ample options for visually styling your site.
• Custom Paths. You’ll notice that as you browse around my site, the web address (the stuff after http://) concisely indicates exactly what you’re looking at; there’s no numbers or ‘index.aspx’ pages or anything like that. WordPress can do this automagically.
• User-Friendly. No one for whom I’ve ever built a site based on WordPress has yet had much trouble at all in changing, adding or removing information or content on their website.

I could go on, but you probably get the idea. If you are considering starting a website for yourself or your company, you’ll not find any platform that is better to start with than WordPress. I highly recommend it.