Over the last 8 years, I've had the opportunity to develop a number of small-scale websites for sole proprietors, non-profits, and small businesses. Freelancers know that sites like this have an inherent problem that developer/designers have to try to overcome. Specifically, we have to deal with the combination of a low budget high client expectations.

One of the ways I've been able to increase my success at overcoming this challenge is by learning to develop with the open-source blogging software Wordpress. Most of my clients don't need blogs, but they can definitely use Content Management systems, and that's how I use Wordpress.

For clients with an existing site, I sometimes develop out on my own hosting space, and migrate to the client's production environment when I have signoff on the finished site. This is one of the sticky points of Wordpress development. You need to move all the php and themes (easy), and you also need to move the content database (not so easy). I've tried several methods for site migration, and here's what works best.

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