Just a quick update on my website upgrading odyssey.
I checked out Wordpress and Drupal. After spending more time and money that I would like to admit I finally realized neither approach was a good fit for my personal predilections. I went back to the original thread and pulled something out that DonW had suggested some time ago, specifically from XARA company. XARA sells a web development tool called: Web Designer MX 8 Premium. The premium version sells for $100. See: http://www.xara.com/us/products/webdesigner/ This is a pretty decent WYSIWYG development tool. It's still a fairly new s/w package. I believe XARA takes advantage of javascripts and CSS. It's all done under the hood. You don't touch a bit of code. It's like designing a web site using Adobe Illustrator, or CorelDraw. It's a great approach if you are spatially oriented, like me. BTW, it's great tool for prototype development. Once you get the hang of where all the tools are located you can whack something out in nanoseconds. Very Quick! It's not perfect. It's not the best choice if you have a very large web site with lots of content with different subjects contained in separate subdirectories. With that said, I suspect there are reasonable tricks to get around such obstacles within XARA if you don't try to push it too hard. But again, I think the software is still fairly new and I'm willing to give them some slack in order to evolve into something more sophisticated. Prior to uploading your revised content to the world you must export it out of XARA's internal file structure. XARA generates a bunch static pages that contain lots of javascrip and CSS files. You can either independently FTP the export yourself or let XARA do the FTPing for you. I hope to have my orionworks.com website revised (more-or-less) by the end of this summer...or maybe by fall. Hopefully, the website will contain additional content, such as my explorations of simulations I've done into celestial mechanics. There might be a Vort or two who may be interested in exploring the subject in more depth. BTW, I haven't abandoned Word Press or Drupal. WordPress was probably a good choice for Mr. Rothwell as he manages the content of lenr-canr.org. While still speculating on the matter, it's possible Drupal might have actually been a better choice for Jed, but the initial learning curve is much higher than it is for Word Press - which explains why Word Press is much more popular than Drupal. I may still end up using Word Press or Drupal to manage specific portions of my website should I need to operate a subdomain that focuses on blogging, or perhaps ecommerce. I think XARA can to that stuff as well, but not to the level of sophisticated that WP and D can currently manage. Again, thanks for the XARA suggestion, Don. I see that the examples of the websites you developed show a distinct XARA "touch". Regards, Steven Vincent Johnson www.OrionWorks.com www.zazzle.com/orionworks
