cocoguru.com now has a new website and design. This is the 3rd design since it started. This time the speciality being, the site is all self developed. Here I like to share our development process and ideas.

Domain Registration of cocoguru.com was done earlier with godaddy.com. Hosting was also done at godaddy.com’s server. Being a market leader in web domain and hosting space, it is also the best in business with minimum downtime and reliable service. Dealing with free hosts or any local hosting space provider can be painful at times.

Website static pages can be developed with html on a text editor or html editors like dreamweaver. Also website can be developed with dynamic pages using Content Management System (CMS) softwares. They provide easy user interfaces where even common users can develop and maintain website pages. WordPress, joomla, drupal are among popular CMS softwares. WordPress.org from Automattic Inc. is the most popular free open source platform for website and blog development. Countless themes are designed, plugins are developed to make the complete ecosystem pretty strong and vibrant. Latest version of WordPress 3.5 was installed directly from godaddy’s hosting dashboard. Then the complete website design and development is done by logging into wordpress dashboard.

We strongly believe in minimalism where focus is only on what is required i.e. contents and anything unwanted i.e. flashy designs are ruthlessly deleted. Latest default theme for wordpress i.e. Twenty Twelve was chosen for this site. It is free and there are many other themes and some of them are paid. Once a theme is selected and systematically followed, the site developer can write his contents plainly in text and not bother about formatting. There may be some aspects of the theme that you may not like, they can be modified if you can or you will have to just live with them. A few free plugins like akismet (for spam protection), mappress (for showing maps), tablepress (for tables), sharethis (for social sharing buttons), formbuilder (for creating forms) etc were installed.

Website pages can be developed by adding pages, Blog can be created by just adding posts. WordPress dashboard has a easy Visual and Text editor to add contents. Each page/post comes with a comment form and a button for sharing on facebook, twitter, linkedin, google+ and email. Header, Footer and Menu are common to all pages and posts.

The contents posted are genuinely about us written by me and not website development company. None of the text or photos are copied from other sites. They are free from jargons/exaggerations like customer satisfaction, high quality, modern infrastructure, excellent service, social responsibility, striving towards growth etc. Photos are again taken by me with minimal editing to just crop the required portion. Information is openly shared to enable viewers to clearly understand about us.

Key Message
Small businesses need not use the services of Web Designers to get their website done. They will charge anywhere between 15,000 Rupees to 35,000 Rupees to get a flashy website done. Instead you could do it yourselves and write great contents to attract visitors.

What Next
The present template is Twenty Twelve as it is. It needs to be customized to get Cocoguru brand’s feel. More contents are to be updated to make the site content rich.