The other day Tom and I were sitting in a meeting where one of our regional leaders was explaining the need to communicate better with our staff members that are scattered around Eastern Europe. In the past we have understood this need and expected to meet it with a website, but website development takes time and money. This project has been on our radar but not at the top of our priorities.

But then it occurred to us that we could accomplish 80% of this goal with blogging software. Blogging software allows anyone to publish a very respectable looking site with no programming experience at all. If you are reading this, you can publish your own blog. Really. Go to Blogger.com or WordPress.com and try it for yourself if you don’t believe me. It’s free, and you can get your own blog running in less than 30 minutes. (I produced squarejer.wordpress.com in less than 5 minutes!)

As we began thinking about throwing up a quick blog template for our area, we thought it just might be possible to get something more robust going instead. Open Source (i.e., free) Content Management Systems have been around for a few years, and we decided we just might be able to get one of these going since they are very similar to WordPress. WordPress is really a Content Management System (CMS) tuned for publishing blogs, and both of us have installed and configured WordPress. We thought we just might have the horsepower to get a CMS going ourselves instead of needing to hire a web programmer to do it for us.

Tom was clearly the person for this job. He can get new things going quickly, and within an hour he had a copy of Joomla running on a new domain he registered at BlueHost.com. By 5:00 today it was nearly ready for the above mentioned leader to start using. The best part of this software is that it allows normal people to publish content through it.

You can see the results here.

I showed this to my wife, and she said, “Wow. Why don’t you just make an evangelistic version of this and give it to each of our countries to translate?”