OK, so here is the deal. www.zone-10.com is being rebuilt for a brave
new world. Has to happen. Mambo is toast and performance is horrible.
Three choices. I've been working with all three and they all have
benefits and problems.
1. Wordpress. Not NEARLY as flexible, but fast to use and there are
more content add tools that make life simpler. Works well for adaptive
websites. Adding content is bog simple. Unfortunately, organizing that
content is bad. Really bad.
2. Joomla. Very flexible. Reasonably fast to use, but fewer content
add tools. Unfortunately, it is not nearly as good for adaptive
websites. Biggest problem is the content editor which constantly
fights you for text formatting. Best menuing system of the three.
Content addition is aweful.
3. Drupal. I've been waiting forever for Drupal 8, which is native to
adaptive websites. But it's more of a bear to administrate. Content
addition is a head-scratcher. Somewhere between Wordpress and Joomla,
but without the intelligence.
Of the three, Joomla has the very best content organization and
menuing system. I find that the adaptave template (Purity III) is gut
wrench for configuring. So bad, in fact, that I'm having to literally
wipe things out to redo it to fix all my junk fixes. Drupal is the
most efficient of the three and gives the fastest website performance.
But it is so hard to get configured that my fear is that it will never
get done. As Joomla is a branch off of Mambo, it's natural for me to
just keep going that direction.
I've setup three parallel systems. Worked with all three. I am finding
that I enjoy using Wordpress a whole lot more than the other two. But
it just lacks the oomph to get all of the various aspects. My website
needs to be three-fold: Reviews/Reference, Products and Services, and
Photography "blog". I can get it to do any one very well, but not all
three together.
So, here is my thought. I can create several individual websites that
"look" like they are one, but in reality, I would have a shell website
that then menu links to the other three. They would be indentical in
every way, but the only thing that changes is the fact that you are
jumping from one database to the next. With Joomla and Drupal, I can
keep everything in one, and if push comes to shove, I can also do that
with Wordpress, but I'd have to vastly decrease the scope of the
website, which might not be that bad of an idea, anyway.
On a positive note, thanks to adsense revenue, the site is paying its
own lightbill. I'd like to get it to pay for more than that and the
key there is fresh content. With Wordpress, I'll be able to provide
fresher content than the others. Also, with Wordpress, the
advertisements position themselves a LOT better than with the others.
Regardless of what I do, the one HUGE change is that every page will
have a fixed page name/address. Yeah!!! That will make it a lot better
for linking and SEO.
Thoughts?
--
Ken Norton
ken@xxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.zone-10.com
--
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