Class 9 – Some CMS’s for Portfolio Sites

Posted: July 21st, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: cms | Tags: | 2 Comments »

Many of you are building portfolio sites for your final projects.  Many portfolio sites share the same requirements and constraints, so I encourage you to exchange information about sites you like, and techniques you’re using on your blogs for all to see.

A number of Content Management Systems (CMS’s) that claim to make the design and development of portfolio sites as painless as possible.  CMS’s generally make it possible for developers to publish content on the web without writing any code.

Some CMS companies will host the website for you.

Be warned: regardless of what they claim, learning any CMS requires significant time and energy – sometimes an equivalent amount as learning to code from scratch.  So unless the out-of-the-box CMS looks exactly like what you wanted it to look like, or provides features you would never be able to do on your own, just beware that you will probably need to learn the intricate details of each of these CMS’s before you can adequately customize it to suit your own site design.

Portfolio-specific CMSs

With that warning, here are some popular CMS’s that have been recommended to me for use with portfolio sites.  They all come with default themes that create decent-looking sites with no coding.  Each of these CMS’s should have either a demo or examples of real live sites that use them.  If nothing else, browsing through the examples linked from these sites may help you brainstorm what you want your own portfolio site to look like:

General purpose CMSs

In addition, each of the major multi-purpose PHP-based CMS’s can be customized to be suitable for a portfolio site.  These are the most popular CMS’s, and they might be overkill for a simple site that just requires a few pages.  However, each allows you to install plugins or add-ons that add functionality that might be useful for such a site:

Hosting of CMS sites

CMS portfolio companies like CarbonMade, CargoCollective, Weebly, Wix, and others combine CMSs with hosting plans.  Basically, they offer you the CMS software for free so long as you host your site on their servers.  Often, this means you have to pay a monthly or yearly subscription fee for hosting to these companies.  Generally, these fees are significantly higher than you would normally pay for regular website hosting from a regular domain hosting company who is not in the business of selling CMSs.

Examples

Some of these CMSs are available for you to toy with on our server.  This means that we are hosting these CMSs on our own server.  See this post for details about how to access these CMS installations.

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2 Comments on “Class 9 – Some CMS’s for Portfolio Sites”

  1. 1 Evan Rudowski said at 4:46 am on December 19th, 2010:

    Hi,

    I’d be grateful if you’d consider adding SubHub Lite to your list of CMS solutions. We recently launched and it’s free for life for the first 2,000 people to sign up. It’s built on top of Drupal 7 and it’s designed for novices, no technical skill required. It’s fully hosted too. We’d love to let more people know about it and also to get your feedback. Thanks so much!

    Evan

  2. 2 Evan Rudowski said at 4:48 am on December 19th, 2010:

    Oh and I should have said, it’s http://www.subhublite.com.

    Thanks again!

    Evan

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