So this post will cover what I have done in the last few days in my challenge to start a business and get one customer in 30 days.

The last couple days I spent most of my time looking for a nice design for my website and speaking with a software vendor about demoing some software I will need to run my business.

1. Website

My domains DNS information changed over so I was finally able to start uploading the CMS (Content Management System) to my site. Before I even started my site I had already decided what CMS I was going to choose and this choice came from past experiences with using three different CMS.

I have used Joomla!, WordPress, and Drupal for various website I have made for other people and myself. The two that I was swaying back and forth between was Joomla! and WordPress. Drupal I honestly didn’t like so I didn’t even consider it. I’ve used Joomla to create our old business website and also a friends business website. I have used WordPress for this blog and another friends website. Both are good systems to use but I personally prefer to use WordPress.

Joomla!

I like Joomla! because it gives you a lot of customization and allows you to create very professional looking websites. That being said I find Joomla! to be very rugged and not  user-friendly which is contrary to what a lot of other people say about it. Joomla! is very technical and I find you need to know more then just basic HTML and CSS to make changes. Also the layout and menu system I have found to be confusing and not very intuitive for someone not very tech savy.

Why do I say this? It’s not that I had a hard time using Joomla!, but when I completed my friends website and was showing her how to use Joomla! it became obvious that it’s not easy for a non technical person to pick up. She got the basics such as creating articles, but even adding images to an article was of trouble for her. The stock layout just doesn’t make things easy for the technically challenged. I had to add in a few plug-ins to make things easier for her. Even after those plug-ins, I still get an email every few days asking for help because something isn’t working right or she can’t figure out how to change, add, modify something on the site.

On top of that I also found Joomla! took up too much of my time creating a website. I spent more time fighting the system then actually designing the website. Weird things like sidebar widths weren’t matching my input, couldn’t center images on pages, images weren’t uploading properly, the list goes on. When designing our business website, we would sit around scratching our heads for an hour trying to figure out how to make some changes because anything we tried that we thought made logical sense just wasn’t working. With my friends site that I created I would have moments of sheer anger because Jommla! was just not doing what I told it to do.

Overall I wouldn’t recommend Joomla! if it’s your first website. If you are willing to put time in to learn how to use it and have some moment a pure confusion, it can be great and allow for some beautifully designed websites.

WordPress

As I said earlier WordPress is my preference for building a website on top of. I like WordPress for many different reasons. The layout, the plugins and the ease of use.

I personally find the layout of WordPress a lot easier to navigate than Joomla!. I find that it is more intuitive and logical. The way everything is laid out and labeled just makes sense. I honestly cannot explain my reasoning why, but I just find it easier.

In WordPress I find the plugin system very simple to use and a lot more free and useful plugins. Since you can search right in the WordPress system for a plugin you want and install it right away there is no need to download the file to your computer and upload it to the site. This works well for me because I ted to use my iPad to do a lot of editing and I can’t download files to the iPad (at least not out of the box.)

Using WordPress day-to-day I am just not as frustrated with it as I was when I was trying to use Joomla!. Again this goes back to things just making sense. The overall flow of WordPress makes using it enjoyable.

Website Design

Now that I selected WordPress as my CMS I was on the hunt for a nice theme to use with it. There is no way I am going to spend time designing my own theme that would just take up all of my 30 days and then more, so I looked through tons of different websites looking for the right theme. I started with some free themes and even tho there were good ones out there none of them I was really excited about. So I decided to start looking through some premium themes.

I came across a website that had some promising themes. Looked through the top rated ones, most viewed and most downloaded still didn’t find the right theme for me. Finally after just going page after page after page… after page! I found one that I liked.. Blah!

It looks great and fits the image I was thinking of for my site. The template has some cool built-in features that will help complement my posted information about my product and services. And overall it’s one that I didn’t look at and think “Who the fuck would use this?”

I uploaded and installed the theme and am currently planning out how my site is going to look page by page.