Software For Building Content Based Websites

Tip: If you are developing sites on any software that uses MySQL take the time to do your research and find a Web Host with expertise in supporting that product.  There are plenty of hosts with expertise in Joomla, Drupal, and Wordpress.

Joomla or Drupal?

Content Management Systems are a Marketers Best Friend! Take the time to learn how to set up and use Joomla or Drupal and you'll be able to build high quality industry compliant Affiliate Super sites that can scale as you grow.

With a CPanel hosting account it's now pretty easy to set up and configure a Content Management System. Internet Marketing IQ is currently running on the latest stable release of Joomla. After evaluating Drupal and Joomla we chose Joomla because it's easier to manage and the available plug ins and templates were to our liking.

You can read all you want about either product, but you are not going to learn anything until you take the time to download, install, and start using them on a test server. We also evaluated a few of the smaller Open Source Content Mangement Systems - Website Baker and CMS Made Simple.  The latter were not any easier than Joomla and do not have the extensive community support.  Both are good products, but not quite up to the standard of Joomla or Drupal.

The only real downside to the Open Source (That means FREE and community supported) Content Management Systems is technical support. The community Forums are your Technical Support.  You can purchase books or hire a consultant that specializes in Content Management for help. If your own ability to understand and work with MySQL, CPanel, and PHP Scripts is weak, then you may want to look to a commercial Content Management System.

Website: Joomla

Website: Drupal

Expression Engine

If it's technical support you need, then you may be better served creating sites based on the Expression Engine CMS.  The downside here is simply cost!  Expression Engine is a bargain compared to other commercial content management systems ($100 for a personal license and $250 for a commercial license at the time of this writing).  But for a beginning marketer that may be out of reach. Expression Engine has an awesome Templating System; but we couldn't find any pre-made templates that we really liked.  So we would have had to hire a designer to make a custom template.  And while that isn't a cost issue for us - it does add a lot of DELAY to each project.  So we chose Joomla.

Website: Expression Engine

WordPress

The new version of WordPress is AWESOME.  And it's also Open Source!  You can't beat the amazing power of WordPress, the huge amount of templates and the cost - FREE!  Because it's Open Source and community supported you don't have a technical support company behind the product.  But Wordpress is pretty easy to figure out so you shouldn't struggle too much.  We suggest you find a host who is very familiar with the product so you can question their tech support department if needed.

There is also an excellent product called SemioLogic that is a whole CMS system based on Wordpress.  At the time of this writing it is being updated for the new version of Wordpress. The reason we didn't go with SemioLogic for Internet Marketing IQ is the way it looks. We just didn't like the templates.  And again to hire a designer takes a lot of extra time.

Website: WordPress

Frontpage, DreamWeaver, and Others.

If you are an artist, you are probably going to like DreamWeaver.  Frontpage is dead! And everything else isn't worth investing time into because of the simplicity and power of the Open Source products.