When it comes to building a website or blogging these days, there are a lot of choices. For me, I knew that I wanted more than just a simple portfolio website. I needed a way to showcase my important pieces, but I was also looking for a creative outlet that I could share with the world. Free blogging sites like Blogger just didn't have the flexibility I was looking for, so I needed to pick a CMS. With a few really solid choices out there these days, the choice took some research.

Decisions, Decisions

I had already made a few sites in Wordpress, and worked with Joomla! at a previous job, but never themed it. Mambo is also a pretty relevant competitor, but for me the choice became clear pretty quickly. Drupal offered enough modules out of the box to get me up and running with minimal knowledge of PHP and a fairly small amount of intensive setup. Drupal out of the box, however, is pretty damn ugly. So that's where I really got to start having fun. I'm not a software engineer, website developer or a coding savant, so my passion in web design lies within, well, the design!

Pimping my Drupal

I'd designed websites before. Plenty of them. Working with themes on top of a content management system is a lot different than playing around in Photoshop though. Looking through small galleries of what were supposed to be some of the most beautiful Drupal sites on the web, the outlook was pretty grim, but I would not be detered. After looking at some themes that I could bend to my will, I settled on the Zen Theme for Drupal. Why Zen? Let's take a look at some of the features:

• 960px wide, 3 column layout

• Flexible sidebars with plenty of blocks ready to go

• Easy to understand region delegation

• Very extensive markup

Zen was introduced to me at my first Cincinnati Drupal Users Group (CINDUG) meetup by designer Brian Vernaski, who was very zealous about this theme and the opportunity it presented to those new to PHP and Drupal. He was right! Between the amazing markup for the theme, the cleanliness of the CSS and my handy dandy Firebug add-on for Firefox, I was able to decipher all matters of theming mysteries.

The Functionality

Like I'd mentioned before, I'm a nerd, but no wizard at "the codes." Luckily my choice in Drupal came with litteraly hundreds of modules, or product add-ons that come free of charge and for the most part involve little more than clicking a checkbox and then theming to implement their use. Blog aggregation and feeds, Flickr integration, tagging and much more were set up in under a week and before you knew it I was staking my claim on the interactive internets!

Conclusion

It's been a long road cowboy, but the trails coming to an end. Well, actually, it has just begun. I've got a website. I've got a lot of ideas. I've got Photoshop, a mouse, ten fingers and a brain. Here goes nothing…