Brand new to Web Design ... advice please

Hi, I'm brand new to Web design and this forum, so please bear with me ...

I've read a few different postings about the different software available for Web design, and also had a friend who works for a web design company (though NOT as a programmer or designer in any way) advise me to look into JOOMLA & WordPress. I've just read through a thread regarding the differences and there was a lot of interesting stuff in there.

I've come to the conclusion that WordPress, in the short term, is easier to use, but JOOMLA is more powerful and possibly a better bet in the long term. It also seems that WordPress is the choice if you want to publish a straightforward "out of the box" web site.

Nothing I have read, though, answers the questions that I have ... so here goes :

I am an IT professional and completely at home with PCs and IBM mainframes alike. I am a COBOL (yes, I'm a dinosaur !) programmer by trade, but have recently been teaching myself to use VBA and Access, though I am far from an expert in either.

I want to design a web site for a company and I want to do it *fairly* quickly, so something that requires a steep learning curve & will take a lot of time to create is not my preference. I want the site to have the basic front end, to be visitor friendly and visually appealing (probably irrelevant which software I use) and for the person whose job it is to update the "latest news" or keep the site up to date to be able to do so failrly easily, that person will NOT be particularly computer literate !!! However, I also want a "private" area to the site, where employees can log in using a secure username and password, enter details into some kind of table, database, spreadsheet & that data can be downloaded by the same person (the "super-user, I guess, administrator, whatever !) that updates the site as mentioned above.

The company will obviously want this site to be found when the general public run a Google, Yahoo or other search engine to look for them.

What software would you recommend ?

 

... there seem to be plenty of you out there with loads of experience and plenty to say when it comes to voicing which Application is the best (i.e. your favourite one), but are none of you prepared to give a newcomer a bit of help and advice ?!?

 

I'd go with Joomla over wordpress, wordpress is really for blogs and it doesn't sound like that's what you want. You can easily find loads of free templates for joomla and there are lots of tutorials to get you up to speed.

 

My uncle is a COBOL programmer. Works mainly in banking, helping old banks acquire new banks and connect the systems together.

Joomla has a better backend for users, Wordpress is easier to use and has a better and easier to manage front end (IMO).

If you want something where users can log in, it's going to be a pretty big task, something you might want to think about outsourcing.

 

Have many Good Template of Wordpress.

 

Out of box Joomla & Drupal are very good, so start with one of those for sure (I like Drupal as my sig shows )

If the design is simple you can use anything without much of a learning curve, but once you get into a more sophisticated design, as well as features you'll need to do some custom scripting most likely. Theming the CMS might give you the most trouble initially, but like I said it depends on the design.

Feel free to pm me with any more specific questions if you want.

 

My advice is to learn HTML then PHP and create your own CMS, however for your requirements that's not possible, I'd say Joomla, but stress that you really should learn HTML along with a bit of PHP (minimum) whenever you've got time, obviously to create a site fairly quickly for a client it's not really an option.

Basically, don't fall into the noob end of web design, do what you have to do(especially as you've just started), then later on take the time to do future projects "right"

 

Hello dear

First Welcome to this Forum. you are at right place. here one can share their information to help each others. You are going to design a website. I suggest you to go for a word press now as it is easy to start with. Jhoomla is effective but takes time to learn. So first start with Word press and slowly goes for Jhoomla or Drupal.

 

Hi and welcome to the Forum.

I have chosen to develop almost exclusively in WordPress, because it's amazingly powerful. I haven't come across anything that a client wanted that couldn't be done in WordPress. You can see my portfolio at the bottom of the page at www.magicinthedesert.com

WordPress is a quick learn. Without knowing much, you could quickly create a website in WordPress, and it will be very user friendly for employees within the company. Joomla is arguably more powerful, but I feel the learning curve there is a little steeper, especially for employees to learn how to utilize the backend management area. In my experience, simpler is better for most clients.

The power of WordPress can really be attributed to it's plugins. WordPress currently has over 3000 plugins, which basically allow you to plug in code to do anything that WordPress doesn't do out of the box. This includes some great SEO plugins that allow you to control meta data, create and manage your sitemap and install Analytics on every page with the click of a button.

As far as WordPress looking like a blog--don't worry about it. The look and feel of WordPress is only limited by your imagination. Using CSS, you can manipulate the site to look exactly like a traditional website (if that's what you want), and there are plenty of premium WordPress themes you can buy that will give you a solid theme to base your website design around. In addition, WordPress has a ton of code that will allow you to call certain items from the database based on their category, tag, etc. For example, I can create a section on my front page that only contains the most recent articles from the news category. This makes WordPress very versatile.

I am creating a set of WordPress Training Videos . The site is still in progress, but if you decide to use WordPress, I'd love for you to use these videos and feel free to request videos based on your needs.