Blogger Archive

As a developer, this is the #1 question I ask myself over and over again. We are faced with goals that we have to achieve and issues that must be addressed and resolved. So we are forced to ask ourselves, what makes it work? What is the best solution that will give us the results we want? I am not here to give the answer, but rather to help you ask yourself the right questions. In a corporate environment, there are many things that have to be considered. Before asking yourself how it will affect the website, you first have to consider the business at hand – the company. There is nothing worse than tarnishing your company’s name via an online website. Our leaders, Michael Platt and Dave Admire, indirectly give very good examples of the mindset needed to help the company succeed.

Even though we’re not directly an internet based company, the internet does account for the majority of the work that we do. So it can be very easy to get caught up in thinking what’s best for the websites rather than keeping the company first. And as a developer, I used to find myself in this situation often. But as time goes, you learn.

It will come to realization for you, that no matter how well a site is designed, how many clients you have or how stable the framework is that the site is built on, marketing is still the key. With all of those key factors, and no visitors, a website can still amount to nothing. But, with a company such as our Plattform Advertising and a team like the Internal Site Managers, I have realized much of what it takes to ensure the business succeeds as a whole. What I hope to take with me in the future, is this knowledge that I feel is very valuable to anyone who decides to get into marketing. And if you do decide to do so, PlattForm Advertising would not be a bad place to start.

There have been many recent additions to the Content Management System (CMS) family in the past few years. In this article, I would like to state some of the pros and cons of the ones that I use the most: Drupal, Wordpress, and Code Igniter. Named in order by personal preference, each of these systems provide different features that can make your website building experience pleasant. None the less, there are some features that may give you a headache that you probably can do without.

Drupal

Personally, Drupal is the lesser of the 3. Not that it’s lacking any major factor that I would like, but simply because it is too complex for its purpose. It is built for with the aim of ease of usage for the developer, but ends up being a lot more than needed. Drupal does have many modules that are creative and useful for focusing on social media networking and a large network of dedicated users who provide help and assistance for other users. The hardest thing to do in Drupal is styling which forces the developer then to focus more on the design rather than the functionality. Don’t get me wrong, it is a very useful system for someone who never intends to touch the site’s files or make any changes to a downloaded theme. I would recommend Drupal to anyone who’s computer programming skill level is beginner.

Wordpress

This may be the easiest “CMS” system to manipulate in terms of having a fully usable admin panel, the ability to add other users and the flexibility to edit site files and style sheets from the web browser. What Wordpress does do, is limit the users to a single content type of ‘post’. This is not good for advanced developers who prefer to have dynamic websites with numerous types of content most likely with different fieldnames and types in the database. However, just like Drupal, Wordpress has Support forum and a big user network of other developers that can answer any questions. This is very useful for ANYONE who wants to have a website up and running in 5 minutes. I prefer Wordpress over Drupal simply because Drupal is a nightmare for developers who need to do some advanced styling.

Code Igniter

Code Igniter, to me, is the best option for ALL developers, beginners or advanced. Some may ask why… It doesn’t provide any admin interface nor does it automatically create any of your database tables unless you tell it to, who why would I recommend it to everyone? Because it helps the developer to actually learn what is happening in the background so that they could handle any issues that come up. It provides functions that make the coding more centralized, similar to the Wordpress and Drupal backend, which the developer can use as needed and just like the other two systems, Code Igniter has a support forum for helping developers. Code igniter has useful features such as the ability to cache pages as they are loaded (user specified), easy URL redirection and it even allows you to create your website in such a manner, that if you decided to change servers, the move would be a snap.

Each one of these systems has their own trait and provides developers with a starting point to be more creative. My personal favorite is Code Igniter for corporate or personal websites so give it a spin and let me know what you think.