I've begun development of my new site. I've come across an obstacle when contemplating design and efficiency. I could certainly use some advice.

I have my forums optimized (with a few shortages I plan to fix soon) based a lot on the information I've picked up here. I am not concerned with the forums, but I am concerned with the homesite. My homepage will include various articles of information revolving around a fairly broad focus. The problem I've encountered is finding the best way to handle the site and her articles.

I've experimented with several content management systems/portals and none output the way I want them to. I love the ease of adding new content that the CMS provides, however, I can not find one that will match my vision or even meld with my forums symmetrically. Because I have found no CMS to fulfill my plans, I believe I will have to hand-code the site. I'm not too savvy when it comes to development, but I can pull it off. The problem lies with merging my vision with convenience. If I hand-code the site it will look exactly as I imagine, yet updating and adding new content will be far from convenient and far from efficient. Coding the site by hand will ensure SEO, but the updates could prove sluggish.

Any advice from the savvy?

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Father J. Vance Tyree
Founder & Curator
World Ancestry

I use HTML for my travel site because like you I couldn't find a CMS that worked well to my expectations.

Apart from SEO benefits, static sites are also easy on the server and usually load faster than dynamic ones (especially on shared hosts).

The effort required in adding content is a little more, but not that much. However the real problem starts when you want to redesign your site, at that time you have to update each and every page and if you have quite a few pages, it can become quite time consuming.

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Well, I suppose if you build a site foundation, updating can be fairly painless. Perhaps I just need some advice on such a foundation.

I'm not too concerned about redesigning. It will probably be a few years before I have to worry about such. I don't mind going through the time and pains of coding. I'm more concerned with small updates such as adding an article here and there. My feelings are in the same pool as your own, Yogesh.

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Father J. Vance Tyree
Founder & Curator
World Ancestry

I used html and just handwrote articles for about a year and a half on my first site, then just bit the bullet and got Joomla. It's not a bad CMS, but I know what you mean when none of them really make you feel 100% happy, unless you remove/add a bunch of stuff which sorta takes away from the point of a CMS.

The positive is that its type in a box and hit submit and not worry about anything else. Just gotta weigh the pro's and con's for what you think would work better. Maybe try both for now and see which one you like more in a month or so?

Those are quite easy to make, usually you have to just update the category page and the home page with the new article. Most often than not its a copy paste job.

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