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hey all,
i am a very newbie to webdevelopment but i am an admitted nerd.

i run a radio show out here in china. we are looking to supplement it with a website based on blogs. our requirements are rather simple- blogs, gallery, shop, and a messageboard. We currently have a messageboard system already but it looks like it might be hard to bring over to expression engine.

hopefully in the future, our website will get bigger and stronger with more content. We do viral videos for some other sites but eventually we hope to host them here.

is expression engine right for me? wordpress? i plan on hiring someone to code our photoshop design into a theme. other than that we would like to be able to manage our own content. thanks for the help.

My personal opinion is that for a relatively simple site, the question is whether you want a custom-looking Web site or not. EE lets you design your site to be pretty much however you want it to be. WordPress lets you change themes, but your site will still look like a WordPress site.

An Expression Engine site does not support themes? I do want our site to have its own look but i actually do like the simplicity of a blog site. are there any other advantages to using the expression engine?

EE doesn’t support themes in the traditional “blog” sense but you can pretty much use any template you find out on the net and adapt it to work with EE or start from scratch and design a totally unique look/feel/style all your own. The EE templates are basically just html/css with some EE tags to pull your content from the database.

The advantage EE has for you, in addition to being flexible design/code wise, is that it has all the components you could need…site, blog, wiki, gallery, forums…all tied together through one membership system. So, your audience can log in to comment, post, etc. with one username/password.

thanks for the replies…

if its not as easy as wordpress to change a theme, how hard is it to make a design the way i like? Is it basic html? i have been tryin to read the tutorials and understanding the difference between a template and a style sheet. thanks for the help guys… can anyone with an understanding of html know how to do an EE site? Or should i look online to find a coder. I ask this because i live in CHINA and people dont really use EE here. They prefer MS ACCESS and I just dont like it. However there are many coders here.

One more side question. Is it possible to have the forum module display chinese?

Yes, as I mentioned, a template is basic html and CSS. Instead of static content (text, etc) being embedded within that, it’s stored in the EE database. You insert EE tags in the template to pull the content from the database.

Probably the easiest way to get a handle on it is to either download the free Core version, install, look at the basic templates, play around with it, see how it works, what does what. There’s also a hosted demo if you don’t want to download and install yet.