Site Design

[Vpr99]

What you should use to design and implement your website really depends on
a. The type of site you want
If you want to create your site 100% from scratch (which is a ton of work) I would recommend using the Adobe design suite (if you have money to burn) or otherwise, use Burnmeister's setup of M$ Paint and Notepad.

However, if you want to expend a significantly less amount of effort & time, I would recommend a CMS. Some of the big ones are Drupal, like you mentioned, and Wordpress, which I would recommend. These CMS sites are relatively customizable, but not near the extent that a fully custom site is.

b. (and this is a big one) How much time you are willing to spend
As a general rule, CMS sites take much less time and effort to maintain and create than a site that you made yourself. CMS's tend to facilitate the updating and creating process for you.

Also, I would not recommend tackling any kind of website project without a team of people to help you. This year, I did about 95% of a completely new site by myself, and it just about killed me. I spent probably 300-400 hours on our site, and that was just to get it up and running, not counting updates.


Hope this was helpful
-Eric, 159