All of the tools available

When you’re a programmer sometimes you can be too quick to jump to a programming solution.

I’m working with a partner on a website that’s about parenting and education. The owner of the business has a background in teaching and developed some materials she’s been presenting in workshops. She’s had a site but it was little more than a brochure for the workshops. We’re working to build the website into an important part of the business.

One of the things I recommended to start with was a blog. Blogs are great for building traffic fairly rapidly. Google loves blogs and there’s a whole blogging community to tap into. So I installed Word Press and decided it might be a good idea to run the whole site in Word Press.

Now Word Press isn’t a full blow CMS but it’s capable enough to use as a CMS what’s for now at least a pretty simple site. And for someone who isn’t tech savvy it’ll be nice that she can use Word Press tools to edit the pages.

The only problem was I don’t want the site to look like a blog with a couple pages. I want it to look like a site that has a blog. The main issue being what’s the home page look like. So I start digging into modifying a template to make a Word Press Page the home page and thinking about using .htaccess and mod_rewrite rules when I stumble across the fact that someone else has thought of it.

Current version of Word Press have the capability to set your home page to a Page and put your blog posts under another “Page” which is really just a placeholder in the navigation menus. How cool is that!

And no programming required.

(BTW, I don’t want to reveal the site just yet since none of the new work appears yet. When it’s in place I’ll be sure to mention it here.)