My first efforts to build websites around 2000 involved opening up Notepad and writing plain HTML. This approach does teach structure, but it is incredibly limiting. Writing out HTML by hand may work for a simple personal website, but it is not an option for any kind of organizational website. For any large or complex website, one must use Imagine the difference between building a deck with power tools versus traditional tools, only greater! Using a powerful CMS (content management system) also makes some of the work more rewarding. Rather than handcrafting tasks again and again, it can allow one to focus on high level design issues.

I choose Drupal because it was open source, free and has a strong community of users and developers beyond it. Many libraries also use it and so I have got started. My web host has the option to install Drupal in a matter of few clicks and away I went in starting to use it. Drupal is by no means the only game in town however; here is a good overview of 10 CMSes including WordPress, Drupal and Joomla!. Like WordPress (which powers this blog), Drupal supports many plugins to add additional features and I very much appreciate the option to customize like that.

What’s the nuts and bolts of teaching yourself Drupal? I like to combine experimentation with a guide. I am reading and working through the examples in Using Drupal book from O’Reilly. Then I have the Drupal installation on my webhost that I can test things on. To structure my experiments, I am recreating the structure (and some of the content) from a library website. I am still working my way through the learning curve, but it is going well.

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