I am sure this topic has been discussed here before but I would like a personal feedback on whether it’s worth my time and energy going the WordPress way for this site: http://www.liturgycentrebandra.org/
It’s a Catholic church based site and as you can see there sections where articles might come up regularly but it also has sections, like the Media / Books, which MIGHT need a look of their own.
I call myself a ‘web developer’ in quotes because I am a self taught beginner for HTML and CSS. The contact us page was created by getting a readymade PHP script and I see the gallery tab would need something like that too.
My friend told me to learn PHP since that would give me more control instead of WordPress since they would have ‘content management templates’ that won’t give me enough freedom to do what I want. I remember when I was new to webdesigning and I spent hours trying to figure out Dreamweaver and then ended up getting things done faster just handcoding in notepad!
So, sorry if this is a ramble but I greatly appreciate any thorough feedback on what I should do. Someone mentioned that http://online.wsj.com/public/page/magazine-index.html?mg=blogs-wsj is made in WordPress. I think that’s impressive. But would a PHP,HTML, and CSS guy have done the work faster or WordPress guy? Also, websites like Wallbase.cc are an inspiration to me since it seems the creator just learnt all the various tricks by hanging around sites like HERE.
WordPress has a CMS side to it too and is widely used in the development community. I wouldn’t strike it off the list of possibilities for any site.
In terms of what you want to do I would say it would work well but you’ll need to be comfortable with editing HTML and CSS to customise the look. Creating themes from scratch can be quite tricky so I wouldn’t go that route if you’re a newbie.
Drupal has an extensive library of themes that you can look through with more added daily so that could be a good option but you’ll need to get to grips with PHP to get it going and it has a learning curve. There are many books available though, see this site
Similarly Joomla has a large libraries of themes but again requires customisation.
Overall I’d go with what you’re most comfortable with but using code to create something from scratch is still the most flexible option as you are creating exactly what you want and the forums and docs for each language will give you great support.