Well, this is my first blog entry on a brand new website to promote my design work and services, which I will be developing over the next several months.

I consider this blog to be part of my professional development, but also as a personal notebook for storing creative ideas, along with articles on new trends and best practices. Most of the entries will comment on my experience using various technologies in the design field, such as the platform that is driving this current website: Drupal 7.

Back in 2006, I began exploring the possibilities of what are known as Content Management Systems (CMS), which create dynamic websites that clients can easily edit through their web-browser without having to know the requisite scripting languages, such as CSS, PHP, HTML and Javascript. Uploading content can be as easy as filling out a web-form -- a concept that revolutionized how people experience what is known as Web 2.0. Static HTML websites, which are normally built offline using a program such as Dreamweaver and then uploaded via FTP, generally do not offer the kind of flexibility that comes with ready-to-use CMS platforms such as Drupal or Wordpress.

As a designer, I think one of the advantages of a CMS is that it allows me to focus on the look and feel of a site's layout, via customization of theme and template files, without having to worry too much about the PHP scripts that run the core backbone of the site. These latter elements are best left to the computer programmers who develop a CMS's code. One particular advantage of Drupal is that it's code is open source, which means that I can rely on a rather large and diverse community of programmers to develop innovative applications or 'modules' that can enhance the functionality of a site, depending on a client's needs.

For example, although visitor's to my portfolio site won't necessarily be able to tell, this current installation of Drupal is running a number of powerful (but light-weight) modules in the background. In the coming weeks, perhaps I will talk more about these features.