5 Platforms a newbee (or pro) Designer should use to develop sites!
Designers love creating things. And especially web artists are found marveling at designs and interfaces. But how can these newbee designers potentially develop sites along with designing them.
BTW designers can check out the Jacob Cass’s $11,000 Writing Project here. We are one of the sponsors!
A lot of designers are confused with all the options available today in the web world. Different projects have different requirement, based on the requirement the designer can choose the following.
1. Simple Corporate/Personal Sites:
This is the first level of sites that you design and build. Usually 5-7 pager site. To keep it simple do regular htmls and apply design. No complex things to do. Nothing to worry here.
Best use: Text Editors/DreamWeaver/CSS editor. Tutorials here, here and here.
2. Medium Sized Websites ( 10+ pages )
If requirement is more than 10 pages go for a CMS. A Content Management System is very much recommended. There are tons of CMS systems available. Pick the simplest. Drupal is great and simple. For more functionality and feature set you can give Joomla a try. It has a much improved documentation and support now. Another brilliant CMS is Expression Engine. Elegant but is a paid CMS.
3. For Blog Designs
For blog designs I strongly recommend Wordpress. The number of plugins/features and support it offers, it simply beats the nearest competitor flat out. Designing a theme for wordpress may require you to know a bit about its architecture. Other options could be Typepad & Movabletype.
4. For E-Commerce Portals.
Gone are the days of OSCommerce and dull looking commerce sites. Move to Magento or Shopify today. They are the slickest open source paltforms available for e-commerce today. Magento has a huge feature list and is ver very exhaustive. Shopify is simple and smaller carts can easily do with it.
5. For Web Apps and Big Portals
This is the last leg of development you can get into. Use a php framework if you need to build a site that has n number of pages and serves 1000’s or millions of users. CakePHP, CodeIgnitor and Symphony rock. Stick to any one of these. You will need to hone your coding and php skills before you even think of jumping into these platforms. You can find a comparison here
These are some very best of the web solutions. A lot more are available for enterprises, crm’s or custom applications. Will share more in the coming posts.
Stay tuned!