CMS or hard code

[Daryll]

I have never had a website that I was 100% happy with , I have tried this and that.
So which is the better option.
Wordpress/Joomla or good old fashioned hard code ie in dream weaver etc.
IMO there are a lot of wordpress sites that just leap out and say "Wordpress" , but they are easy to set up and get working.

Daryll

[Rowleys]

Well if you ok with coding i would say hardcode as CMS is database run. If your myslq server is down so is your site and for to go wrong and cost more.

I do my website hardcode to make it the way i want it.

[discomobiledj]

Do it however you are comfortable doing it. As long as you have a decent host then that's 99% of the job done.

[Danno13]

If you're starting from scratch then CMS is probably best. I'm pretty competant in HTMl/CSS/PHP and wrote all mine from the ground up, yet I'd still have moved mine to a CMS long ago for ease of adding new pages and changing the theme each year to keep it fresh. Problem for me, is I'm already well established with google and it's very hard to replicate all the URLs and tags that are already working well for me, using a CMS, oh and my code is neater as well :D

[Jason]

Agree with Danno on this. There are many plug-ins, templates and help with Joomla/Wordpress.

If you're able to code PHP, then there are tools to help you add your own code.
For instance;
http://www.dancesoundsdisco.co.uk/top-40-music-charts

A custom bit of PHP to scrape the BBC top 40 charts, and present in my own table with sortable headers (done in JQuery). It didn't take too long, and was easy to test as a stand-alone script.

The rest of the site is mainly pure Joomla with CSS tweaks and an off-the-shelf template.


For very small sites, plain HTML is fine, but you'll soon have problems with menus and internal links.
This can be overcome with server-side includes for common blocks of code, or if you can afford Dreamweaver, then a template will solve this problem for you.

My main gripe with CMS is the problem with bad HTML, and often embedded styles and javascript (which should be on separate files).
Most of this is due to template restrictions, so not always easy to fix.

For any NEW projects, I'm going Wordpress or Joomla. The benifits of easy content updates and potential plug-ins outweigh messy code.
In fact, the ability to create good content on many pages may be far better SEO that tidy code.

[Tom]

I would say it all depends on how much time you got to play with and what you know.

If you use a PC, just simply use Notepad++ or either Textmate or Coda if your on a mac and code something from scratch. I am currently doing the same for my bands website. I would say get all the text down first before adding CSS and JavaScript. :)

My brother has modified a readily available Wordpress theme called Starkers, but called it Slim Starkers as it's even more basic than what was originally made by a guy called Elliot Jay Stocks.

You can download Slim Stickers here - http://codebymonkey.com/projects/

Simply click on the GitHub Project link in red to download it. :)

[thex-faders]

CMS All the way. We're using Joomla. Still tweaking the template slightly but we're having some fun doing event blogs etc and as everyone has said, gallery modules and things are readily available for free most of the time and if your not great at coding its the best option.

Easy to use and lots of information on the web if you need help with anything.
Tom

[Jiggles]

CMS but my own script :)