I just spent a week trying to redo this website. I’ve had a website up and running with WordPress for some time now, but I wanted to do something a little more advanced and a little more visually appealing. I had been using a standard free blogging theme for WordPress. It worked but was a little lack luster. I did a little research and found two other CMS (Content Management System) applications that were very popular; Joomla and Drupal. Let me admit that in the end I stuck with WordPress.

Out of the two new CMS options that I found I experimented with Joomla first. Joomla was built to be a content management system that does blogging as well. WordPress was originally built to do blogging, but it is slowly evolving into more of a CMS system. I installed Joomla, in a testing location, with my hosting companies 1-click install script. It was up and running in under 2 minutes. Now it was time to learn the interface a little. I spent about 30 minutes looking around and playing with settings. I found the interface to be fairly intuitive and well organized. Next came the process of creating the actual site. The default Joomla theme is pretty basic, boring, and in my opinion very ugly. So I did the only thing I could do… Googled Joomla themes.

OK, so I admit I searched for free Joomla themes. This was probably what lead me to my final decision of not using Joomla. While there were tons of themes available I really had trouble finding one that even looked half way decent. At the time I was unwilling to purchase a theme. I figured that this was just my personal website, that I won’t be making any money with the site, and why pay for something that I can get for free. Well I searched through pages and pages of free themes and finally found one that looked fairly decent on the live preview. As I got into customizing the site I kept running into barriers. I couldn’t customize a certain part of the theme that I wasn’t happy with. Parts of the theme just didn’t work or display properly. I just kept getting more frustrated as time went on. I kept downloading new themes and kept having the same issues. So I decided, the hell with this, I’m going to remove Joomla and try out Drupal.

As with Joomla I used my hosting companies 1-click installation script and it was up and running in a couple minutes. The first thing I noticed about Drupal was that interface was entirely different than WordPress or Joomla. I spent an hour just trying to figure out how to create the initial page and how to add content. I then started searching for free themes again. After an hour of searching I found one and tried to create a functional page. That is when it all went south. Now keep in mind that I am an IT guy, I know computers, and can pretty much figure out anything just by playing around with it for a few minutes. Drupal I just could not figure out enough on my own to create a complete website. I tried to read how-to articles and other information I could find on the internet, but the deeper I got into it the more I realized that while Drupal is immensely powerful, it is just more complicated. It would have taken much more time than I was willing to invest to learn it. Just about then I decided that I may have to actually pay for a theme for either Joomla or WordPress.

Like I mentioned earlier I had been using WordPress for quite some time, so I decided to look a some premium themes for that first. I found www.themeforest.net. I have to say I was blown away and amazed when I saw some of the themes for WordPress. I didn’t even know WordPress could do some of the things that were in these themes. I settled on a theme called Over’All. You can find it here. I was impressed by the simplicity of it, the clean look, but it still had a little eye candy to it.

In the end I stayed with WordPress for it’s simplicity and because I was already familiar with it. It is easy to setup, easy to use, easy to learn, and as I found out, as long as you are willing to cough up a few dollars for a premium theme, it can do some amazing things. If I had chosen to find a paid theme for Joomla I am sure it would have fulfilled my needs just fine. Although the learning curve is slightly higher with Joomla. Drupal seems to be a very powerful system, and I have no doubt if I had the knowledge, or the willingness to take the time to learn, it would have worked out just fine too. I was looking for something easy and quick, but that allowed me to create a decent looking site. WordPress fulfilled all of those criteria.