Ok I see this question asked so often : What do you use to build your website?
Short answer is : Macromedia Dreamweaver, CodeCharge Studio or WordPress.
But you gotta know what you want out of your website first. Do you need a custom website with a custom database to handle to your company’s catalog for example? Or do you simply want an online editor to post text content on basic layout website?
Building A Dynamic Website With a Custom Database
If you’re not familiar with programming, I suggest you go out and hire a programmer through a business or developper you know. An alternative would be to search for web developpers over at http://www.getafreelancer.com/ . You can get the job done for cheap.
For my part, I only develop with PHP. Sometimes I happen to code only with a text editor. To do that, you better learn PHP . When it comes to more complex web sites, I use YesSoftware’s CodeCharge Studio for PHP development and Macromedia Dreamweaver for web design. I know Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 is out but I haven’t tried it yet. I’ll let you know when I buy it.
Building A Static Content Website
If you need to build a simple website with few pages that won’t be updated often, I’d go with Macromedia Dreamweaver again because it allows you to work faster. I wouldn’t go into content management systems as they require installation, configuration and maintenance.
You could also work with any other HTML editor of your choice such as Adobe GoLive.
Sorry, I can’t recommend Microsoft FrontPage, get over it with this one please! It sucks ass! lol…
Building A Text Content Website With Basic Layout
When I need to build a simple content website like TheWebmastersCafe.net, I tend to use WordPress. It is an open-source tool which basically means it’s free. All you need is a web host that supports PHP and MySQL. They almost all do now. WordPress is a PHP blog but you can pretty much turn it into a CMS (Content Management System). There are also some more complex CMS like Joomla and Mambo which are free too.
WordPress might be easier to install and use but Joomla is a bit more complicated to run. By the way, let me tell you some bad experience I’ve had with Joomla.
A few years ago, I got this web site development contract with this big company (let’s call it Camoplast to keep it anonymous). They said they wanted a CMS. I said fine, I can install you one. So they showed me their current out-of-date CMS which sucked ass. They said they basically needed to do the same thing they did with that CMS but only updated. So I showed them a Joomla demo and they all liked it. We were going to stuff about 400 pages in there and that basically was the contract. So we started putting up everything and that’s where it got ugly. The customer now needed more and more custom dynamic content. So I started tweaking Joomla a little. Now they were getting an idea of all the “new possibilities” available since their old CMS. They wanted more custom programming, they wanted to insert videos, they wanted to use Flash with dynamic content through XML…. Arrrgghh… I finally gave up and stopped the project which ended in a 100% custom web site and a loss of time and money.
So my point is not that it’s not a good CMS. You just gotta know it’s limits. If you modify it’s code, then you’re f*cked when the time comes for updating the CMS (for security reasons for example). That applies to most CMS in my opinion.
Conclusion
Choose your tools wisely. Make sure you will be able to expand the site easily if you need to add dynamic content. Building a professional website? No cheap tool is gonna make it, go and get what the professional developpers use.
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