Designing Websites With Blogging Software

Dec 11, 2006

Actually the title is wrong but that’s what is connoted by a post at The Blog Herald titled Blogging Tools Replacing “Ordinary” Web Design Software? You don’t “design” a website with blogging software, you can manage it, and in fact I was planning to recreate my content writing and copywriting website with the help of WordPress, but it would have taken me lots of time putting the content into blog posts and pages. It’s a good idea to manage your website with a blogging software because one, blogs are liked by the search engines, and two, by merely changing the template/theme you can alter the look of the complete website without much fuss. In fact if you hire a web designer insist that you should get your website developed using (using, again, not with) a blogging software because that way you’ll be able to add/edit/remove your web pages on your own. Even the navigation will be regenerated according to your changes.

You must know a blogging software doesn’t help you design a website. Blogging software is mostly a content management software. It shows the content you save in your database. The blogging software is more of an interface. It uses a pre-designed layout to display your content. For creating layouts and designs you still need advanced web designing software or you have to do the coding by hand. I do it by hand. Whether its DHTML or CSS, I write every single line by hand.

Coming to the topic of this post. The controversy started with a post on the death of FrontPage due to blogging by John Dvorak on his blog. Robert Scoble wrote a counter post stating that the team at Microsoft killed FrontPage on its own because they felt the web designing community didn’t find it appealing. Well, it’s high time the guys realized this. No self-respecting web designer would ever use FrontPage. In fact it was at one time considered insulting to associate a web designer with FrontPage.

Still, I must say I know many people who used it, and none were designers. They were people who just wanted to publish their websites on their own and for them I think it was a handy tool, even though it produced bulky code. It’d be a surprise to me that people have stopped using it because of blogging software. I think FrontPage is so pre-blogging. The last time I opened it was perhaps in 2000.

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