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troy beckett
12,035 PointsPutting a blog on an existing html website??
I have a website built in HTML CSS Javascript, and I know want to add a blog to it. I've used a blog or a content management system before so I have no clue of the process.
What are the best ways of adding a blog to my website?
Do I need to completely rewrite the whole website?
Also are all the websites made for people made on content management systems, because when searching google it seems so hard to be able to add a blog to a website but every website has one?
1 Answer
Kevin Korte
28,149 PointsHey Troy,
Two main options here to add a blog to an existing website. One is to use a traditional CMS like Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, etc, the other would be to add a blog through a static site generator like Jekyll.
Jekyll might not be for everybody though, but it's an awesome little tool for what it is.
For Wordpress for example (or Jekyll), you could install the blog CMS portion as a subdomain or in a subfolder, depending on if you want your URL structure to be www.domain.com/blog or www.blog.domain.com. That choice is up to you.
You can than style the blog to look like the exiting website.
You could also rewrite the entire website to be completely on a CMS platform, but that's not necessary. Many websites have custom CMS's, and thus might just have a blog function part of their custom CMS. Many more business websites are on a CMS like Wordpress and just take advantage of it's native blog function.
My favorite example is Dollar Shave Club
They have an attractive website built on Magento, however their blog is built on Wordpress, and themed very similar so most people won't even notice. Here is their blog: https://www.dollarshaveclub.com/page/blog
troy beckett
12,035 Pointstroy beckett
12,035 PointsThanks for your comment what you wrote is really helpful and I appreciate you taking the time.
For the subdomain method is there a tutorial I can follow or anywhere I can get some more information, when I was looking for a solution a lot of people mentioned your method but I can't find anywhere I can study it.
Also I started using treehouse because I was interested in websites and just wanted something to learn. So I've never really made websites for anyone except small ones for myself. I was sitting the other day wondering about the process of making websites for clients and got a bit confused. If for example I was going to make a website for some local shop the way I would make a website currently would mean it would be hard for the website owner to constantly update. As they would need some knowledge of websites to upload changes.
What does the process involve to make a website that allows someone with no idea of web building to be able to update there website some else built regularly is this cms?
Where or what is the best way to learn this process? Sorry to keep asking questions by the way
Kevin Korte
28,149 PointsKevin Korte
28,149 PointsAs far as subdomains go, it's really easy when you actually do it. I assume your host probably uses cPanel. If so, this link will apply, it's not hostgator specific. It'll be the same for any host using cPanel
http://support.hostgator.com/articles/cpanel/what-is-a-subdomain-name-how-do-i-create-and-delete-one
As far as building sites for someone else, you'll need a CMS. It's not fair, and it won't work to expect your clients learn about websites to update them. And you don't want to marry yourself to having to be the one who makes all edits for a client. As you do more and more, you'll spend more and more time with your new clients making changes. It's not a model that scales well.
The lowest entry bar would be to take the Wordpress or Drupal courses here. Both are ready-to-go CMS that you could customize to build a pretty decent site. Both are more extendable than they seem.
As your skill increases you'll look at doing more like rolling your own using MVC frameworks like Rails, Slim, Laravel, or Django. At least that was my progression. I started building sites the static way, than moved on to building everything in a Wordpress site, now I am mostly use Rails and roll my own CMS. This happened over a 2 year period for me.
Just remember, cms means Content Management System. It's a very generic term. A CMS can be a prebuilt solution, or it can be custom, just depends on what the site needs.