This site is currently implemented with WordPress 3, being used as a Content Management System. The current theme is a child theme of the Woothemes Canvas framework. The site should be ‘responsive’ to different devices, particularly desktop and mobile devices, and accessible to users with disabilities.
Why WordPress?
I kissed a lot of CMS frogs over the years and got little but headaches and slime on my lips. Massive beasts like Joomla, Drupal, Typo3 and others have a steep learning curve and generate slow websites because even the simplest page view requires a number of SQL queries to be run. See the fine article by Mike Schinkel on why WordPress is a better CMS than Drupal. These heffalumps also abstract you from the code, which is always frustrating when you want to find out what’s going on.
WordPress hasn’t turned into a princess as yet but she’s showing promise, particularly with the advent of v3, and there comes a time in a web developer’s life when s/he has to stop gadding about and settle down. It’s is a ‘right-sized’ system in which to implement small to medium websites, which are what I mostly manage and develop, plus it’s imbued with a nice sense of humour and has a large and helpful user community.
Home page
The site home page cum portal is implemented with CSS2 and XHTML, and uses the following images:
- orkney_shore1.jpg - background photo, resized version of a photo of mine taken in Orkney in Summer 2010. See the original image on Flickr.
- right_arrow.png - derived from “Architetto - pulsante 3” from openclipart.org
No other images are used on the home page. The rounded corners are courtesy of the jQuery Corner plugin. The layer and text colours were ‘eyedropped’ from the background photo for harmony.
