My Website
A significant part of job-hunting will involve a decent web presence. Almost a year ago, I moved my personal website onto Drupal in order to get more knowledge of that content management system. I played around with it and experimented with various features to push the limits of what could be done in Drupal without learning PHP.
Well, when you do several dozen things just to find out whether or not it's possible, the visual result you get is not necessarily in line with attractive design and usability. The site has been mentioned during interviews with people* who had googled my name, and of course it isn't a good idea for them to see a site that I'm using for testing.
I've taken the testing as far as I want to go. It proved Drupal to be reliant on PHP scripting. I could accomplish almost nothing with markup that I could do easily with markup before. I soon learned that there is no reason to use Drupal, Joomla, or Plone if you just have a bunch of articles and a blog. I have never succeeded in using Drupal to make something I felt was attractive or user-friendly, and I don't think it's necessary to put in the effort that system requires to do so, when I could look to other alternatives.
I'm currently in the process of backing up the content to my desktop, and I plan to switch to Wordpress, which reportedly allows much more layout with CSS. I see no reason to spend several months trying to learn PHP for Drupal when I already know markup languages that work splendidly. Besides, if I'm going to learn a programming language, there's no sense jumping to PHP before I've finished trying to train myself in Python. I'd get them mixed up.
The objective of my main website is to have several dozen webpages on my domain connected by a unified navigation menu. The important factor of my technology choice is the ability to edit the HTML and their mutual CSS from fields in the browser, so that I can edit it at the homes of friends or while on trips. I'll then embed things from my accounts running on other web services, such as embedding this Livejournal on the homepage. It's ironic that Wordpress is a blog, but my interest in it has nothing to do with blogging, because its own blog feature is not connected to my friends list.
Another thing I will do soon is register a separate web domain for my portfolio of usability graphic design.
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