Hello exoticwelding, Welcome

Megan — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 01:22:50 +0000

Hello exoticwelding,

Welcome to the forums, and welcome back to web design!

Where to start really depends on what you're trying to do. These days most websites are dynamic. That is, they contain structured content that changes frequently over time. This content may be re-purposed in different areas of the site (e.g. your idea of having one page with a list of links to articles on separate pages). CMS's are built for handling this kind of content. A CMS could, for example, automatically generate your list of links, including excerpts of a certain length, images, or whatever else you want to show.

I'm really not sure what some of these other web-based site building tools do. I'm assuming they work much like the old Geocities tools, or Dreamweaver would. You build static pages within a template. There's no way to automatically generate a list of links to certain content - you have to build that all by hand. This could be useful if that's what you want.

A CMS really is a web-building app. It just works in a bit of a different way. Most websites these days are built with some sort of CMS or custom content management tool.

From your description it sounds like you need something more dynamic. You want different types of content - your "how to's", a forum, a picture gallery, and a news article area. You probably don't want to build all of that by hand with static pages. Wordpress is primarily designed for blogs, which is not exactly what you need.

Drupal, on the other hand, could be a good fit. This site operates on Drupal, and we happen to know a lot about it. It does take awhile to get your head around it, but you could start slow with a simple theme (design), and one or two "content types".

Please post back if you have any more questions, or would like some direction on getting started with Drupal.