EvoBloggito

WordPress Selected Best Overall Open Source Content Management System

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Nov 23, 2009; Category: Content Management System, WordPress; Tags: CMS, WordPress; 2 Comments

We’ve been on the WordPress-as-CMS bandwagon for several months. Recently, we heard WordPress was awarded the Best Overall Open Source Content Management System award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards, beating out Drupal, Joomla, and a bunch of other geek favorites. We didn’t even know there was such an award, but of course, we like that it confirms our point of view that WordPress is a great CMS.

Recently we posted that All Small Business Websites Should be on a Blog Platform, by which we really meant "on WordPress." We were trying to appear open-minded. But really, we’re biased: we love WordPress. There, we said it! And we don’t care if the whole world knows it! WordPress has earned our favor by being simple, flexible, and powerful. And the more we use it, the more we understand how simple, flexible, and powerful it truly is. Read the above article for the benefits of blog-based websites for small businesses.

Also, check out our recently released (September 2009) CMS theme: Evo4 CMS. It was designed specifically to be used by professional designers who need a CMS for websites that incorporate a blog. We suggest it for professional designers because it’s not pretty out of the box, and you’ll need an excellent understanding of Photoshop and CSS—along with some understanding of PHP—to use it as the basis for a great website. You can also download a companion Photoshop template to help in the skinning (we can almost guarantee you won’t want to use the theme as is: it’s gray on gray).

Evo4 CMS WordPress Theme Launched

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Oct 1, 2009; Category: Content Management System, Design/Development, WordPress; Tags: CMS, WordPress Themes; 2 Comments

We’re really thrilled to announce that we’ve launched Evo4 CMS, a free theme for WordPress that is specifically made for building business websites that include an integrated blog. These are the kind of sites Google finds really attractive, provided the content produced on them is focused and frequently updated (always a catch!). Evo4 CMS is not much to look at as downloaded: just a dull gray, blank canvas. But that is easily remedied by a skilled designer who can use the provided structure on which to render a gorgeous website.

EvoBloggito and evowebdev.com are built on a beta version of the theme, and just last week we launched storiesthatsellguide.com on the theme, so it’s been shaken out and had the bolts tightened as needed. While we’ve made it available for download to anyone, we really don’t care if anyone downloads it or not. We created it to provide ourselves with a better platform and starting point for the kind of websites we’re building more and more often: business websites with integrated blogs, which are updated by our clients. So WordPress functions as the content management system our clients use to update their website as well as their blog.

You can review the (very gray) demo site here, with a look and feel only a programmer could love. But if you know how to look beyond the surface and inspect its structure, we think you’ll be impressed. Because we made the theme for designers, we’re also making a companion Photoshop template available for download, to assist with the page design phase.

Why is it so gray? A couple of reasons. Frankly, we want to discourage amateur bloggers from selecting the theme for their blog. It’s not really the best choice for a blog-only website, and we don’t want all the email from amateur bloggers asking us how to do whatever it is that their inexperience keeps them from understanding. More important, however, we wanted as close to a blank slate as we could get in terms of appearance; nothing that could steer the look and feel for a particular client. We don’t want it to be obvious by appearance that two different client websites both used the same theme as a starting point.

So there you have it, our first WordPress theme. I think there will be more, but first we need to make some hay with this one.