Trying to build websites that look great can sometimes be a daunting task, especially if you have little programming experience or html knowledge. Keeping up in the ever expanding internet lanquages is an ongoing battle and tough for even seasoned programmers. Now take into consideration that with todays website standards, a stand alone web page just doesn't cut it anymore. Thats right you cant just grab your wysiwyg editor anymore and throw up a decent looking page and still expect people to love it. They want more, they need updated content, rss feeds, dynamic headers, polls etc. How can anyone pull this kind of stuff off and not spend their entire life on one site.

The answer is simple, its use of a content management system or cms. They keep track of your information in a database and through queries they pull the info and create your pages on the fly, as needed. Drupal is one of the most popular cms systems out there, check out drupal.org to get more detailed info but in short it gives the novice web designer, or even the never been a web designer the ability to create great dynamic sites. Drupal can handle anything you need from blogging to forums, article submission sites, a newspaper site and more. So out of the box you have a great site with a lot of functionality but the look probably isn't your thing. Drupals default web site is a little bland, basic looking (not ugly though) but pretty cookie cutter.

It uses what are called themes in drupal to give the site a look and feel, color scheme and css styles. Everything part of your site appearance for the most part can be changed by editing the theme. You can either choose one of the themes that comes with the drupal installation, edit your own from scratch or get online and find some great themes. Free Drupal themes are somewhat hard to come by but they are becoming more and more availabe. Drupals main site has quite a few to choose from, but again you need a fairly large variety to try and stand out. Sites like drupalthemesonly.com carry free themes without the need for a backlink in the footer. They add more all the time. Because Drupals open source aspect sites like that love to give back and share their templates and knowledge on making your own.

In short with a little help from open source cms's like Drupal and some ready made themes, designing a complicated beautiful website can now be done in a few hours instead of month