An important part of web design is separating your content from the underlying programming. In the old days (late 90′s) there were ‘webmasters’. Webmasters were the gateway that you must pass in order to do anything with a web site. This not only included the original design but also included any updates. There are many web sites developed this way today. Tekpals believes that your content is yours and that you should be able to update content on your own without any involvement from us.
Think about it. You don’t need to call a construction company when you want to paint your house. You just paint it! Web sites should be no different. You should be able to change content, add pages or change graphics when you want.
There have been several Content Management Systems (usually referred to as a CMS) over the last few years. Many of these were hard to use, didn’t work well or required extensive customization. WordPress started in 2003 and was primarily a blogging tool for many years. In fact, many people think of WordPress as a blog. WordPress was first designed as a blog engine; however, it has evolved to become a full fledged CMS. A CMS is much more than a blog. A blog is designed for sequential entries and allows a user to find entries by date, category or other attributes. A CMS manages all your pages not only your blog entries but also all your content.
Just compare these two ways of editing the exact same web content. The screen below shows how to edit a web page in Dreamweaver, a very popular and powerful web development application.
Here’s how you edit the same content in WordPress. If you’ve ever used a modern word processor, you should feel right at home here.
That’s why we’re big fans of WordPress! WordPress stores you content in a database and gives you an easy to use panel to update your content. If you can use a word processor, you can edit your website content. The admin panels are very easy to use allowing you to access your content anytime you want without needing our help!
Almost every site we build, including this one, is built using WordPress!
WordPress also allows a lot of flexibility for the look and feel of your site. WordPress is built using themes. A theme is a set of files that provide for the basic look and feel of your site. A theme contains the page layout, colors, graphics and other design elements that vary from theme to theme. There are both free and commercial themes. If you have very specific requirements, Tekpals has designed custom themes to meet exacting client requirements. We can also make more extensive changes such as integration of a membership system, a shopping cart, custom sidebars, callout boxes, advertising links, interactive and dynamic features and much, much more!
There are many free themes available for WordPress. In fact, we’ve written tpSunrise and tpBranches, free WordPress themes anyone can use.
We also use commercial themes. We’re big fans of both Woo Themes and the Genesis theme framework. Themes allow you to have a great looking and functional site without spending a lot of money for custom design.
