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I've had a number of people ask me how I built out downwind.com.au and what software I used to do it. The technology for building out a website is not difficult to use and doesn't involve a degree in computer science from some expensive university. It's actually all quite easy to do.
 The other day I went to an Internet show and noticed that every second stand was trying to sell a content management solution (CMS). After speaking with one salesperson they calmly told me that the starting price for a website was a mere $10K and this even included an FAQ area.
But wait there's more! The $10K was just the start. A further 25% of the fee was then charged on an annual basis for hosting the website. I politely indicated that I thought that this was highway robbery and moved on. It amazes me the number of people that blindly pay large sums of money for development when the tools are readily available to allow you to at least get a prototype up and running yourself.
So what did I do for Downwind.com.au? I have my own personal server that costs me about $100 per month so it became the logical place to host my new adventure. You can get much cheaper solutions and have them completely managed by the hosting companies but I sometimes like getting my fingers dirty in the system (call it a throw back to my youth) so that's why I have my own server.
The base platform that I use is Joomla (joomla.org) which is one of the most popular content management system available (the other being wordpress) and the best thing about it is the price. Yep, you guessed it, $0.
Installing Joomla can be done by your hosting company but on my server it took about 5-10 minutes. What did take a little more time was the selection of a nice template to apply to my site. There are literally thousands of templates that range in price from free to maybe $100. I spent about $20 for a professionally designed template that didn't need some fancy web developer that charges a fortune get near it.
What does Joomla allow you to do? Joomla provides the core functionality for things such as:
1. An areas where you can write content that appears on your website in a word processor like environment. Forget the complicated HTML code that seems to bamboozle even the best of us. You can also have sections and categories to make sure that all your content is in the right spot and easily accessible by your users.
2. Users or as I like to call them members can setup accounts to subscribe to newsletters get access to restricted areas etc. I didn't have to deal with complicated Internet security or any of the other things that seem to crop up when you talk about "logging in". It's all done for you.
3. Menu system so that as the site gains more functionality you can make it visible to your members. I can add a menu to my site in about 1 minute which is my idea of development.
I will continue this series in what I did in building out Downwind.com.au in the next article in the series which will go into the different applications that I then installed into the site. There's some seriously cool stuff in the next article that I think you love!
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