I love working with Content Management Systems (CMS) because they work off of the database concept. Every page, article and photo reside within a database. This gives me, the programmer, and you, the website owner, total control over the content on your website. Since the content resides in a database, it’s more secure.
When it comes to open source, free to download and use CMS tools, there are several great choices available: Drupal, Joomla! & WordPress. Of those three, WordPress is my favorite by far.
Why is WordPress my favorite Content Management tool? It has the best support, hundreds of free themes & plugins. This gives you just about all the tools you need to create a fully-functioning website that you can start posting to right away.
Customizing WordPress is a little trickier as not all of the free themes are conducive to customizing or adding widgets which allow you to position content & plugins on a page. What I prefer to do is stick with a premium-you-pay-for-it template and select the layout (position & number of columns) and style (colors & fonts) that best suits my customer. I then take that template and modify the style sheet to conform with the design my client has chosen.
The website design is created in Photoshop. Up to 3 different design concepts/variations go to the client, who then selects the design they like. Once approved, I start working on the style sheet. Elements such as background image, banner head, colors & font family are pulled from the layered Photoshop file are then added to the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS).
JA Web Design is a custom version of StudioPress’ Sleek Theme. StudioPress themes are well-designed and based on the Genesis Framework. I highly recommend that any time you want a great theme for your WordPress site, go to StudioPress and select from one of their great designs. Then, when you’re ready to have your WordPress site customized, contact me.