Is a CMS recommended for beginning a personal website with only a few pages?

Question

I want to build my own personal website. Nothing very fancy, about 5-6 pages with a blog, about page,a page for my pictures and a few more pages of content mostly about what I am interested in ( programming, photography,family stuff etc).

I feel CMS System is overkill for what I am attempting to do, but I'm not too sure.

• I am quite familiar with ASP.Net and C#, so I was thinking I can crack open visual web developer express and do the site with that from scratch. Is that an approach that is recommended? (Maybe a few years down the line I might regret not using a CMS system to start with.)

• What sites can you point a beginner web site developer to learn about the various things required for building a web site (I don't mean technical things like HTML/CSS etc, but all the other planning stuff/design stuff/SEO stuff.)

• I don't think I will need a Database to start with, but how far can I go without one?

Answer 1

If you want a blog and just a few pages then use Wordpress. It's probably the best blogging software available and it offers the ability to add and manage pages outside of the blog. Basically it does everything you need to do all in one neat free package.

Answer 2

In my opinion, a CMS is almost never overkill. Once in place, a CMS is the difference between just writing for your website and writing and doing code fixes. It's going to save you time over the long run as you need to make changes to your website. A database is also almost always recommended because you can export the data anywhere. You'll probably find it easier to get a decent open source CMS for PHP than ASP.net. I'd recommend using either Joomla or Wordpress for the size of their communities, but you can try a lot of different open source PHP CMS demos at OpenSourceCMS. And here is a list of other languages as well.

What should you look for? That's entirely up to you, but I'd recommend looking at the following criteria:

• Security
• Ease of use
• Ease of development
• Speed of development
• Ease of extension/expansion
• Size of community
• Tone of community (look at the forums to see how helpful people are)
• Number of add-ons
• How often the project is updated
• License/Price
• Host compatibility

At first, your biggest priority will probably be how quickly you can create a template. Choose a few different CMS's that you think might meet your criteria and then look for a tutorial on how to create a template for it. If you have a hard time finding a tutorial for templating, it's probably a good sign that the CMS isn't a great choice.

Answer 3

If it is a personal site, then how you approach the site is down to what you want to get out of it.

If you already know Asp.net you shouldn't have much difficulty getting something knocked up fairly simply. Then you can develop and expand the site in whatever way and as far as your imagination can go. Doing a site from scratch gives you complete flexibility to create something exactly how you want it. It will allow you to stretch your development skills and you have something to add to your CV.

You will need a database for any dynamic content of your site. In particular to manage your blog - unless you want to be typing out raw Html for each page (I don't recommend).

You could use xml for your dynamic content if you have to avoid a database, but that will bite you very quickly. Databases are quick and easy and nothing to fear.

I recommend this site as it is a gold mine of information about running a site!

Answer 4

Before you start to develop your own things from scratch you should look at whats available - there are some free open source options on the .net platform worth checking out.

BlogEngine.net is a fairly popular and asp.net 2.0 based (and open source) - see http://www.dotnetblogengine.net/page/Feature-table.aspx - if you are primarily going to add content to the blog and image section I guess this will be a great starting point. I haven't tried it my self, but I would expect it allow you to add what ever you want around it / change it.

Regarding database; my experience is that you can use things like flat XML files just fine for smaller sites if your amounts of data (not counting images etc. here) is small enough to keep in mem and you do not write very often. Looks like blogengine.net lets you select both xml and sql.

About SEO - try out WebMatrix from MS (currently in beta) - it has build in SEO features which can crawl/analyze your site and list improvements related to page structure (like having multiple h1's is bad etc). I did an overall intro to WebMatrix here http://docs.composite.net/C1/TeamBlog.aspx/2010/08/13/The-WebMatrix-experience - you can also download BlogEngine.net this way.

Answer 5

5 or 6 pages? Create a static page for your design, chop the header and the footer off into separate files, then create those 5-6 pages by including them.

<head></head>       <--- Include this

<content></content> <--- Customize this for each page

<foot></foot>       <--- Include this