UPDATE 20181003 Wednesday…
Genesis Framework and Child Themes from StudioPress. Extremely easy to customize, responsive design with beautiful mobile presentations.
I get bored every 2 – 5 years and redesign and tweak. This makes that doable, without relearning everything from scratch.
This is very old… Like beginning of the internet old. -Ish, anyway. 2008…
In May I re-wrote this site while studying css and xhtml. I wrote it entirely in static pages, with some menus created by css hover tricks. I did some quick research and integrated – well, actually, more tacked onto the side – WordPress web publishing software.
I used the capability of the WordPress application, then had to step back to the static pages and re-adjust them to fit the changes in WordPress. WordPress was providing a better basic underlying structure than the original site.
This design is WordPress based.
Rather than integrating WordPress with existing static pages, I started over. I can restyle the site independent of the content. All the styling is in one place. And WordPress is just very very good software.
I don’t like leaving content on someone else’s server. As good as the intention to preserve my data may be, if they lose it, or restrict it, I lose, they do not. So I run my own servers. Servers and applications are a joy for me to design and setup – I try to keep maintenance, ongoing attention, and complication at a minimum. That is work. I really do not want to come home after doing this all day, and be forced to perform the same tasks. This structure is simple to set up, easy to backup, doesn’t require any tweaking or jiggering to have run correctly – it can be synced to a second server easily.
Backing up easily – I believe that data that lives in only one place will be lost. Eventually. I run backups to optical media, and never leave data on a single hard drive or single location. I watch people keep photographs on a hard drive, from a digital camera, and ask, have you backed that up? Invariably the answer is “No, I’m going to get to that.” Enterprise level data has been saved by the developer who made a copy of his work. When the backups failed to restore data, he could recover his work.
Ease of setup – I used to compile my own custom kernels to get features out of linux. Now I avoid that. There is virtue in simplicity. The less custom crap the better. There is also much less work over time in the simpler solutions.
WordPress is a simpler solution. It is very good basic structure that can build out over time to a quite extensive site. It allows less work to run my own site, and the content can be exported easily to hosting sites if more bandwidth becomes needed.
—dsm