I've never really liked web development, primarily because of the need to learn all these browser inconsistencies and deal with them. I guess I'm an idealist programmer, and tend to choose environments that are more universal in deployment. This tends to put me in the realm of virtual machines or authoring environments.

However, as I am striving to be a good content creator on the Internet, there's a certain amount of web development that I need. And also, I find myself offering to help build people's websites because this is a necessary component of The Mission of connecting people with motivating ideas.

So, say you need to develop a website...how can you do it with the least amount of pain and suffering, with the most features, an incremental path toward improvement, and retention of control over its visual appearance?

A TALL ORDER.

Picking a base offering

I'm familiar with three ways of developing websites: custom static HTML, modified WordPress Themes, and modified Expression Engine Themes. WordPress and Expression Engine are content management systems (CMS) that use databases (MySQL) and server-side scripting languages (in this case PHP). The advantages of a CMS is that they incorporate a lot of useful functionality that people tend to expect in a full-blown website.

Well, for now I'm going to go with ModX. Here are my ModX Integration Notes. And here are my CodeIgniter Integration Notes.