Posts Tagged ‘drupal’

WordPress or Drupal

Thursday, January 19th, 2012

GORGES does not have any intrinsic preference between, Drupal and WordPress. We can and will provide either. Several recent clients have posed this choice. We think this choice needs to be based in the technology.

Wanting to be as unbiased as possible, I have researched online several times and offer these two third-party views:
http://www.bivingsreport.com/2007/wordpress-vs-drupal/
http://www.quis.com/2009/06/01/drupal-vs-wordpress

Both articles try to be unbiased, and I think they succeed. Neither writes that WordPress and Drupal are on the same plane. They both assign WordPress to the simplest of websites and Drupal to the next echelon. This matches our considerable experience. WordPress provides an elegantly ease-to-use CMS. It is the appropriate choice for lightly featured blogs and very simple websites.

Here’s the experience of someone who “loves” WordPress (the language needs editing):
http://kevinjohngallagher.com/2012/01/wordpress-has-left-the-building/

The Drupal community is on a different track. Drupal is a machine for making interactive websites – newspapers, magazines, large corporate websites, online stores. In the spectrum of technology, Drupal picks up where WordPress leaves off, and takes us toward standard web applications. When the project no longer fits “standard things you do on a website,” it is a web application that requires a web application framework. GORGES will in that case recommend the appropriate framework, maybe Ruby on Rails, Yii, or .NET.

It should also be noted, that when a client is engaging GORGES to perform setup, to propose designs, to guide the process and provide training, the distinctions having to do with ease of setup, theme decisions, and ease of use become inconsequential. GORGES shoulders those.

The differences between WordPress and Drupal are finally differences in capability. What interactive features does your website need now and how likely are you to want significant visitor interaction in the future? Is the site to be a one-time undertaking, or is it likely to grow thought time? If these are not issues, WordPress might be just right.

What is the best way to manage the content of a website?

Monday, April 20th, 2009

So you have or are considering a website for your business, and know that you need to manage the content, but what is the best way to do so?screenshot_1

In the old days of the web, content management was done using the same people who programmed the site.  They would open up the right file, edit the content, and ftp the new file up to the web server.

These days, that process is slow and error-prone, and the management of your content should be done by the business owners, product managers, editors, or marketing personnel.

Use of a content management system (CMS) is imperative if your site is going to function as a quality business growth tool for you.  You need a CMS that is easy to use and always accessible.  Search engines and human visitors both are looking for fresh, relevant and updated content.

Big budget publishing companies have sophisticated work flow software to manage the development of their content, allow editors to review this content, and publishing editors to approve for release.

But what is the small website owner to do? At Gorges Web Sites, we have been delivering special-purpose content management systems for years now.  At first, we used our own CMS, affectionately named ‘GoGorges’, which is a linux- and php-based development framework and content management system that we steadily improved over many projects.

More recently, though, the open-source content management systems have really come of age.

On recent projects, we have used:

Each of these systems have pros and cons, and through experience we have learned which one is most suited for a particular set of business and publishing needs.

The great news is that the use of these content management systems has lowered the cost for delivery of a sophisticated website.  You can get more functionality for less $ than ever before!

If you’d like to learn more about how one of these content management systems can help your business and improve your search engine optimization rankings, then fill out our quick form for your free consultation and we’ll jump on a call to discuss.

Christopher Grant, CEO of GORGES, has been building Internet web sites and commerce applications since 1994, pioneering early database-driven Web application and e-commerce projects. He has been instrumental in the construction of hundreds of Internet projects, large and small.
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