I agree too about making sure your CMS is search friendly. The sad reality is that most aren’t SE friendly, but some of the newer systems have been written by people with at least a basic understanding of search engines.

True CMS on the other hand have more complete feature than blogging. Some of CMS such as drupal have forum, blogging and news features. also can be use for e-commerce.

In marketing plan, don’t forget to use SE friendly. because this is very important to boost our traffic from search engine.

Last time I looked at Drupal, it has a medium-functional e-commerce module that is actively developed. It can be used for small to medium shops, like the ones you might want to put on your site, just for fun.

Full blown shops might wonna use Zen Cart or use every bit of Drupal module, if anything. Of course, Drupal offers other modules, so that is not entirely clear until you learn Drupal and its modules.

Oh. I guess I sound like a Drupal fan. Maybe I am one, too.

Also, I have to agree not all businesses need a shopping cart, and things like that. As a portrait photographer, the ‘net doesn’t stop me from having to come face to face with my client. So why not exchange signatures then? I give them a contract saying in exchange for their payment, I grant them unlimited rights to use the full set of images in any non-commercial way they’d like. ( This is still rare among photographers, who grew up owning the negs and making a lot of their income on reprints. ) We both sign the contract, they sign a check. Honestly, I’m mostly brick and mortar, but use a web site as my portfolio, and to become more well known.

But there are advantages to learning and doing for yourself. I think even if I was in a different business I’d still want to learn how to build a website.

I’m obviously with you on the shopping cart. Yuri is right that Drupal is a good all in one solution and you can find modules you can add to it for most anything you want to do. But not everyone will need a shopping cart. Myself for example. I sell services and don’t have any need for a cart. If I did choose to sell a product like software I probably still wouldn’t need a full cart. I do have a billing management program so I can accept credit cards, but for me a full cart would be overkill. And if I’m not mistaken WordPress does have a shopping cart plugin. Don’t hold me to that, though. I could very well be mistaken.

I agree with you that if you do have more than one of two products to sell then WordPress alone isn’t the answer. At the very least you’d need to add a shopping cart solution to the mix, though there are some good ones. WordPress is free as are shopping carts and you can still get a decent solution using them.

Of course it might be easier and less expensive to use one application than combining several. I just wanted to offer another solution to the mix.

You do have some strong opinions about this don’t you. I take it as a sign you’re passionate about Drupal as a solution, which is a good thing and a good recommendation for using Drupal.

Sure, even TechCrunch is on WordPress, but what kind of forum do they have? A shop? Anything?

The gripe I have with integrating anything with 3rd party software is that it doesn’t look and work pretty. With Drupal, I can do anything I want and it’ll look the same and offer more ways for visitors to interact with the website.

Of course, you can develop anything, based on WordPress (I have seen it happen), but why spend your money on developing something, when there’s a free, better version of what you want?

I guess I am more strongly opinionated here, than I suspected, but oh well.

And let me say again your post is a good one with plenty of useful advice on ways to build a successful site on a small budget.

But yeah, if you only want to blog and to sell your informational/software products on your site, you can very well settle for WordPress.

Developing a custom theme is the best choice, as it’ll give you a unique look and feel, as well as, possibly, enhancements for the people and the search engines (yes, most freely available themes aren’t perfect).