Delivering IT Projects

Welcome to the Blog

The articles here will help you to manage your IT projects effectively. Please feel free to comment and come back regularly for more.

If you have an RSS reader, there is a feed available here

---

Building My Website

Posted by Cathryn in : Technology , trackback

A few weeks ago, I decided to revamp my website. You can see the results here, and, as a small aside from project management, I’d like to explain how I did it.

First of all, I thought about what I wanted. The site had to be clear and easy to use. It had to be simple for me to update it and add new content. I wanted to amalgamate the blog I was running on a hosted blogging service with my main website.

Then, I thought about what I had. The old site was written in Frontpage, which is unwieldy to update quickly. I had been using Wordpress as a blogging tool for a while, and found it easy to use. Personally, I had some rather rusty general Unix and SQL skills and a strong affinity for hacking scripts, having done a lot of shell scripting in a previous life. My writing skills are fairly good, and my graphical skills absolutely lousy. I was also doing this on a tight budget.

I explored Wordpress, which is free, open-source software written in php, html, css and mysql. Php looked fairly similar to the shell / c type languages I knew a long time ago. Wordpress had the advantage of a number of useful plug ins which would take me very close to where I wanted to be. CSS looked completely incomprehensible.

I found a Wordpress theme which seemed to have a lot of the features I wanted, and a number of plugins. For the record, these included:

• The Regulus Theme, from Binary Moon.
• Filosofo, which allowed me to have a home page that wasn’t a blog.
• Ryan Duff’s contact form, used on the ‘contact’ page

At the same time, I was lucky enough to be given a free copy of Maria Langer and Miraz Jordan’s book ‘ Wordpress 2 Visual Quickstart Guide‘, which has some very good chapters on how Wordpress works and is a good start for anyone wanting to work with it.

I also commissioned Ruth Rollason from Marmalade, who had already done my logo for me, to give me some thoughts on the layout. The bits that look good are her ideas!

And then, it was down to me. I completely redid the header, and made major changes to the way the content is presented, to the extent that this is not really recognisable as the original theme. This took a lot of work in php and css, but fortunately there was no need to get into the internals of Wordpress itself.

The technical side of the work has taken, not counting a few false starts and learning, about two days. The writing of the content is an ongoing task, and I will continue to tweak and to add new content.

If you’re starting with basic programming skills, particularly in a Unix environment, this is a fairly easy way to create a basic website for a small consultancy or professional services business. I’ve had to pay for the design work, and the hosting service I use to run the site, but the ongoing costs will be only in my time and because of the way its set up that will be minimal.

message
name email url