Sitebuilders or equivalent on Dreamhost?

[csfitz]

I want to recommend a local small business owner to Dreamhost who is a non-techie newbie. She wants to launch two sites on an impossibly modest budget. One of them could be hosted just fine with a simple structure built by a sitebuilder program like what Yahoo, Earthlink, Thinkhost and other hosts provide.

Q1: Does Dreamhost have or support a sitebuilder program that i haven’t been able to find?

Q2: Are there equivalent applications out there that cost little to no money and work with Dreamhost?

Q3: Is everyone here just using CMS tools? It’s a bit elaborate and too much work for the needs here. But given the task, is there a simple and beautiful/elegant/etc. open source CMS that someone could recommend?

Thanks in advance!

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[rlparker]

Q1: Does Dreamhost have or support a sitebuilder program that i haven’t been able to find?

Not really - though several such things can be easily installed for your clients’ use.

Q2: Are there equivalent applications out there that cost little to no money and work with Dreamhost?

Absolutely! Most any such tool can be installed (thinking cmsimple.dk here, for example).

Q3: Is everyone here just using CMS tools? It’s a bit elaborate and too much work for the needs here. But given the task, is there a simple and beautiful/elegant/etc. open source CMS that someone could recommend?

People are using a little bit of everything here, though with the “one-click” install of Joomla! and WordPRess ther are many users here taking that “easier road”.

I know that Joomla! can be a bit of an overkill for simpler sites, but the recent versions of WordPress, with the fairly recently added “Pages” functionality, makes a very serviceable and easy to use solution for what you are describing.

I think it is even easier to use than the “site builders” you refer too, and with the ginormous number of templates available, a user can put together a very attractive site in almost no time.

You might find that if you look more closely at using WordPress as a CMS/Sitebuilder instead of just as a blogging tool, you will find it meets your clients’ needs very well.

Other “simpler” CMS type systems that I have used at DreamHost with success include cmsimple (already mentioned) and websitebaker, There is also a pretty good selection of such things you can actually test “in the wild” at opensourcecms.com (look particularly at the “lite” section!).

–rlparker