CMS or no CMS? That is the question

So should we develop the site from scratch or use a CMS?  Quite frankly it has been an easy question to answer this time round.  The time it has taken to develop the backend of a new website and design the layout previously has been too time consuming.  Although I can script ok in PHP and am familiar with Mysql I’m not the fastest nor am I any cop at design to be honest so it has been an easy option to decide to use a CMS (Content Management System), but which one? Open Source CMS is worth a look for ideas.

There are many CMS open source scripts available, Joomla and Drupal being quite popular but one that I have been paying some serious attention to is Modx which I think is brilliant, if you haven’t heard of this CMS before visit their website, it is well worth considering it for a future project.  Although I think Modx is brilliant, I have actually chosen to use Wordpress.  But thats a Blogging tool I hear you cry, yes that’s true but with the use of certain plugins and a good theme Wordpress works very well as a CMS and many affiliates have utilised it for this very purpose, ukoffer springing first to mind as an example.

One of the other reasons that I have chosen Wordpress is a theme (or selection of themes) that I stumbled upon by Brian Gardner at revolutiontheme The magazine theme was exactly the kind of layout I was looking for so what would be the point in spending valuable time designing and developing a theme from scratch when one is already available and easily customisable if you know a little about css, html and php?

So we now have a home for the new website and a place to host it. Bargain