Lately, I’ve had quite a few people ask me about how my website is built, so I’m writing this post with the goal of answering a few of the most common questions.

How did you get started with your website?

My first major website project was for a group I played with many years ago called the “Green Street Brass Quintet.” I built this site using Macromedia (now Adobe) Dreamweaver and Fireworks (for the graphics). As a static website, it was very hard and unwieldy to manage. I also made a very poor choice for a hosting provider by trying to find the cheapest one I could. However, overall I was happy with the result. That group eventually broke apart and the website was taken down. Years later in December 2006 I decided that I needed a website to promote myself, and thus derek-wright.com was born.

When I first started derek-wright.com I did not wish to spend the same massive amount time that it took for the Green Street Brass website. I decided to use Apple’s iWeb. This application allowed me to create an ascetically pleasing site, however, it’s flexibility was extremely limiting. The html code that it produces is very hard to read and nearly impossible to modify. Within iWeb you are limited to Apple’s small number of themes with no way to change things as simple as layout. The program also created static web pages. As with the Green Street Brass website, it made managing the website difficult. However, this difficulty was more of a problem this time around since the website has features such as a blog and a calendar, elements that almost demand dynamic management. As a result the blog and the calendar were rarely updated and eventually removed. However, due to my lack of time for and due to the difficulty of the management, lack of interest in the website I stuck with Apple’s iWeb for an entire year. Finally, in December 2007 I decided that a major change needed to be made.

I found out about a piece of software called Wordpress. It is a dynamic content management system. It originally started as blogging software, but eventually evolved to become a fully featured piece of software appropriate for many uses. Wordpress is software that you install onto your hosting server and manage using a “Dashboard” that you can login to at your site. In this Dashboard you can make entries to your blog or updates to the pages of your site quickly, easily, and from any computer connected to the internet. You can use themes to customize the look of your site, without the need to reenter your content. With a little knowledge of HTML and CSS and themes are usually customizable. However, there are so many themes available that the need to customize a theme is usually minimal. I would recommend googling “Wordpress Themes” to get started with your theme search. The most useful feature of Wordpress is its extensibility. There are thousand of plugins freely available that really give Wordpress its power. You can take a look at the plugins here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ . If you wish to know more about Wordpress in detail I would recommend going to http://wordpress.org/about/ .

What hosting service do you use?

I use a Linux hosting account (Economy Plan) at godaddy.com. As far as I know, it provides the best combination of reliability and features for its price. No matter who you choose to be your hosting provider make sure that the account offers MySql databases for use, or else you will not be able to use WordPress.

How long did it take you to put together your website?

For my last redesign (completed just a few days ago), I would estimate that it took about 6-8 hours of total work. I did not create any new content, I just reorganized it. However, I did quite a few modifications to my theme.

Are there any other pieces of software that you can recommend to me?

I like to use the GIMP (the GNU Image Manipulation Program, www.gimp.org) to edit my photos. It’s not the easiest piece of software to use, however, it’s free and powerful.

Are there any other tips that you can give me?

Although it should be a given that stealing other people’s content is wrong, I see this happen far too often. This fact is especially true when it comes to taking photos off of the web. If a photo/graphic does not explicitly state that it is in the public domain, or under an open license such as Creative Commons it is wrong for you to use it. Just because the content on a website doesn’t have a copyright symbol (c) at the bottom, it doesn’t mean the content is freely available for your use without permission.

In addition, if you use a free theme created by someone else (even if you modify it) do not remove the credits. You are using the result of someone’s hard work for free, the least that you can do is continue to display the credits that they (usually) placed at the bottom of the page.

For my final tip, I will say that as far as design is concerned, simpler is usually better.