Managing a frontispiece website

With my blogs sorted for the moment, and at least the possibility of a tweet in the future, it behoves me to pay attention to my non-blogging websites. For this I have two (related) domains. One is essentially just a personal site for my friends and family. The content is variable, highly particular, and not really interesting to anyone for whom it was not intended. Unless you really, really want to know how to bake the best chocolate chip cookies in the world, ever 🙂

The other domain, which I mentioned in my previous post on this subject, is a frontispiece for a sole-proprietor consultancy business I set up some years ago. Almost any work I do these days is some form of consultancy, so it seemed appropriate. But it isn’t something that I intend to build into a vast business empire. So I want to keep that site mostly empty other than for contact details. People find out about me when they meet me in person, or, as per the norm, Google me, and if interested we take it from there. That’s enough for me. I’ve got other irons in the fire that need tending. Still, it would be nice to do something a bit more useful with this site. For example, I would like to write an article on my explorations of Drupal (ongoing) and host it there. That might lead to other articles, maybe even one on thinking through your PIO. So that site might grow. Managing content there might then become an issue.

You do not need to take on a full-blown web-hosting package in order to maintain a small frontispiece web presence. There are numerous no-cost options available. Two that I have looked at are Drupal Gardens and Google Sites. They both have their strengths and weaknesses.

Drupal Gardens is very enticing for anyone who has played with Drupal, is shamefully inept at backend systems administration (as I am), and who longs for the eye-catching goodness of the soon-to-be-released Drupal 7. Of course my claim that one doesn’t need to fully grok the Drupal backend is somewhat misleading. Once you get past the incredibly simple steps necessary to create a site, the user still finds himself or herself with a vast array of choices and decisions. Hard decisions. Despite being far more intuitive than the Drupal 6 interface, I think the user here will still want to go through some serious Drupal study and thinking. As per usual, Drupal 7 has almost limitless possibilities, but that may be too much for the simple frontispiece website. Nevertheless I’m going to keep exploring it in hopes that the veil will lift from before my eyes. It really is what I’d prefer to use.

Google Sites is equally easy to use in order to create a simple, or even a modestly complex, website. It is easy to enable co-operative website management. And there is plenty of room for growth beyond the 100MB of webspace a user is provided initially by moving up to the Premier Edition of Google Apps as and when it becomes appropriate. Indeed, if you are really just starting out, I think it would be best to simply start with the standard Google Apps package, which gives you Google Sites as well. The downside, at least for me, with Google Sites is the lack of rigour in its widgets. Whereas Google does a great job with the various widgets in Blogger.com, the comparable widgets in Google Sites are often just not up to the job. At least I’ve found many that didn’t really work. Maybe it is different in the Google Apps version, I just don’t know. Nevertheless, if all you really want is a simple frontispiece site, then Google Sites is fully able to provide that.

That brings me back to my thinking about my PIO. Do I really want or need a website that is substantially more than a frontispiece? That, as they say, is the real question.

Posted in thinking.