I’m occasionally asked how I build web sites, who my service providers are, and other web site related questions. I thought I’d sit down and write out a little inventory of what’s running where, and how it all fits together. And just so you know, this article will probably be out of date just as soon as I post it—this stuff changes that fast.

Let’s start with my web hosting company: LinkSky. I switched to them about two years ago, because my previous company was charging me a lot of money for very little space and few features. LinkSky charges me very little for lots more space, unlimited bandwidth, and more features. The trade-off is that I have to be somewhat self-sufficient. I install all my own software, configure it and get it up and running by myself. LinkSky offers no help with any of that—but I’m sort of at the point where I really don’t need any.

LisaVollrath.com is powered by WordPress. Some of you might have WordPress blogs hosted at WordPress.com—well, this is pretty much the same software. However, I have it loaded on my LinkSky server space, which allows me to install all sorts of extra goodies like custom themes and plug-ins. The gallery is powered by Coppermine, which is a very large, full-featured gallery package. I don’t really love Coppermine, because it’s a much larger package than I need, but I now have so much work posted that migrating to something else is just too frightening to contemplate.

Ten Two Studios is also currently powered by WordPress. It uses a heavily modified version of The Morning After theme, with some assorted code snippets to create the shopping cart effect. I use a PayPal shopping cart, and the downloads are facilitated by the nice folks at E-junkie. However, I’m currently working with Zen Cart on my test space, and plan to migrate to it as soon as I feel like I know what I’m doing with it. It’s much more complex than the current site setup—like, the current WordPress powered site has about 30 tables in the database that powers it, but the ZenCart database has over 100. It might be a while before I make the switch, because there are a lot of features I haven’t learned to use yet. I want to make this switch so I can stop using Etsy to sell kits, and E-junkie to sell downloads (they both charge a small comission on each sale), and so I can start doing sales, specials and discount coupons, which I can’t do while I’m on the PayPal shopping cart.

Go Make Something is powered by Joomla and Coppermine, which are bridged together to allows users to log into Joomla, and remain logged in when they surf through the galleries powered by Copppermine. I don’t love Joomla, but I use it because it allows me to limit most of the how-to content to registered members, which is something that’s not so natural in blogging software like Wordpress. I would like to eventually migrate the site onto software that allows me to be a little more arty in my layouts—Joomla is a little rigid about letting me present content in a way that’s visually pleasing.

The really wonderful thing about Zen Cart, Wordpress, Coppermine and Joomla is that they’re free. There are a whole bunch of talented folks out there who contribute their time and abilities to creating them and keeping them updated. Each piece of software uses themes and plug-ins that are also free, created by more developers. There are support message boards for each package, and for most of the themes and plug-ins where idiots like me can go for help when things don’t turn out quite as planned, or when we’re wondering how to do something. Just last night, I was reading the Zen Cart message board, looking for information about using banners to customize category pages, and found a snip of code that allowed me to put three lovely banner boxes on the main page of the site that will rotate images and links. It’s very cool, and took two minutes to insert—and it was just something one person figured out and posted. I really love that collaborative feature of these packages.

Well, that’s it. I hope this helps those of you who are wondering how these things fit together.