Website Launches
I just launched a website for the yoga teacher that had a real part in making me a mentally and physically stronger person. I was so flattered when Coeli asked me to work on her website, I just jumped at the chance. So, here it is... http://www.coelimarsh.com!
I made it using Wordpress (what my blog runs on). I could have made it from Drupal, but I've found that if you're not doing any heavy theme work and the site isn't complex, Wordpress is really the way to go.
The opposite was true for mcgtraining.com, which already had an existing design. I found myself struggling to theme in Wordpress, whereas I find it much easier to do so in Drupal. My instinct said to try Wordpress, though, because it's such a small site, but hey, I learned from my mistakes and now it's all done.
Two happy websites!
Restless Virgins the website in Wordpress
The other reason I've been so busy these past few weeks is I've been working on Wordpressing the Restless Virgins website. It just went live last night. Yeah, sure, it's been up for a while and hopefully you wouldn't notice too big a difference between the old site and the new one if you've been before. Yesterday it was a bunch of static html pages that could only be edited by someone not terrified to look at code. Bad. Now it's in a very pretty admin-friendly tool called Wordpress, which is what's running this website, too. Good.
I originally thought Drupal was the answer to everything, but after thinking about it some more, if you're looking to build a fairly straightforward website, brochure-like with some basic archiving functionality, I'd go with Wordpress. Here's why:
1. There's some good support for the basics. I was easily able to add a basic calendar function for their events and you can mess with categories to get them pretty much to do what you want.
2. I prefer their admin UI for editors. It's really pleasing to the eye and their wysiwyg editor is clean, simple and functional. It's also very AJAX-y, which I'm a sucker for.
3. Like Drupal, it's super easy to install with one-click install, and there are more out-of-the-box features that come with that install than Drupal does (like blog and wysiwyg editor).
4. Plugins (equivalent to Drupal's modules) and themes are as easy to add as in Drupal, just a quick upload to the right folder and activate through the UI.
5. It looks like there are lots more templates to choose from and I think designers built a lot of them, as they're much slicker-looking than the Drupal themes.
That said, I do love Drupal and will use that as the platform of choice at my day job because of its incredible extensibility (and a host of other reasons that may be written in a post in the very near future).