Nerding out with wordpress
If you've ever tried to keep a website, have you ever realised just how difficult it is to keep the thing up to date? Especially if you have to upload pages manually using FTP (file transfer protocol). It's just the most annoying thing in the world, and puts you off the idea of updating it altogether. Recently though, I've discovered the wonders of wordpress- which is a free CMS (content management system) originally intended for blogs.
wordpress's cool user interface
It has a snazzy interface in which you can write 'posts', tweak 'themes' and add plugins (shown above). It uses PHP scripting (or as I like to call it: magic) to place content into your website quickly and easily. Not only this though, you can tweak it so much that by the end your site no longer looks like a blog at all and by doing this you can quite happily use it to create decent, usable websites for small to medium-sized companies.
Which is what I've attempted to do at: flowersgoinggreen.com (this is being hosted here for a small time, whilst the hosting and domain is sorted out). It is a friend of mine's floristry business, and a nice touch is that even when the site is completed, he can go ahead and log into the wordpress editing software and add/edit pages as much as is needed, in an intuitive and simple way that doesn't require any coding.
Yes, I realise that this may be a bad idea for all us webmasters who, in the past, could make a living updating companies' sites at an hourly rate and charging incredible amounts of money for the pleasure of doing so. However, think of it this way: if the company did ever want you to update their website for them it would take a fraction of the time required to update a normal one- especially if it's something that applies to all existing pages.
Unfortunately though, I wish I had figured wordpress out earlier, and have the sudden urge to convert all my past client's websites into wordpress blogs... oh well!