Your clicks are worth money and you may need to take control of them. That’s what I did when I created my own organizing portal on the web recently.
At first I considered Google Sites as an organizing tool. Google Sites are great and I highly recommend them as a means to get started on the web. However, for my purposes they had a limitation, namely that hyperlinks were redirected through google.com. Although it is actually a small price to pay, for me as a web developer I felt it was important to not have my clicks traverse through Google.
After several searches for an appropriate CMS system, including strongly considering WordPress as a CMS, I decided to manufacture my own web portal. I found an open source template design — open source template designs typically consist of a stylesheet (css file), auxiliary files (usually a set of images used to render the page style), and an example index.html file. In my own way of managing sites, I used PHP. It is easy to refactor these template sites by just renaming index.html to index.php.
The next overall step was to factor out code that is best kept common, such as menus and sidebars. I put these in to something called layouts.php, and surrounded the banners, menus, footers and the like with PHP functions. At this point I also created boilerplate.php and underConstruction.php files for use as starting points for new pages. This comprised the overall framework, and for the purposes of a personal portal I began creating one or more pages with useful links, this being a work in progress.
I also added an on-line bookmarks script — I will have more to say about this in a future blog post, but the features of this script include importing Internet Explorer and Firefox bookmark files, and fairly easily. The data is kept in a database, and my intention ultimately is to read this database to create a large site map (or you might say “web map”).
Just in case it is not clear, the ability to follow my approach requires the correct hosting service. I use Westhost, and they have some extremely competitive packages and support very powerful tools. Yes there are more powerful ways to produce on-line content, but the real limitations are not whether the developer spends thousands of dollars on tools, but the imagination and productivity of the individual developer.
What have I gained from my personal portal? I have an online presence for myself that works anywhere from any computer and is customized to make access to my frequent work with the fewest clicks possible, and without those clicks being redirected through Google’s servers. It was a bit of effort, but worth it.