Products I use

Many development businesses will point you in the direction of commercial software with costs ranging from $150 to much more. In my opinion, there is no advantage in paying for these products as a small business owner. The open source software that is freely available via a general public licence (GPL)  is at least as good as most products on the market, and often offers better support.

For content management, I use Website Baker, an open source, PHP-based Content Management System (CMS) designed with one goal in mind: to enable its users to produce a website with ease.

For online shops, there are a few options available, depending on the number of payment options and catalogue size.

I encourage my customers to make donations to open source products used when their websites go live. Donations encourage the developers of open source software and show our appreciation. If there is a particular product you are interested in, please feel free to contact me and ask.

Links to further information about Website Baker

• Website Baker home page - features list and basic documentation
• User community forums - ask questions about Website Baker, get a feel for the user and developer community, see sample completed sites in the "Website Showcase"
• OpenSourceCMS demo page - OpenSourceCMS runs a site that allows you to try out lots of different CMSes. There are two links here, one to the "front page" (this is the page that everyone sees), and one to the "admin page" (this is the page that you update the site from). If you choose to have a go, please bear in mind that this is an out-of-the-box installation. The look and feel of your "front page" will differ quite a bit from this, however the "admin page" will essentially be the same.