I’ve been looking for a content management system to use for building my new venture, the channeltom.com website. I want to put a very basic site together about me, with links to all my stuff on it. Literally just a few pages.

I’ve looked at Joomla and a few others but they all seem very procedure driven and quite hard work to use. What I’m after is something snappy to put together and dynamic, sort of drag and drop, much like iGoogle or the new personalised versions of the BBC website.

I did some very brief searching yesterday and found Jaws, which at first appeared to do the job. Now I have it installed I’m not so sure. There certainly is drag and drop functionality and it is quite easy to use, but the way it manages content appears to be quite strange. There is an object (Jaws calls them Gadgets) embedded on the main page of your site which you cannot remove, and this is where any other requested gadgets load when you open links to them. This is messy.

Perhaps I am missing something, but I really don’t like that. I’ll have a further play today and see if I can find some sites which have been built with this tool to see how they did it.  In fact I’ve just checked and the Jaws website itself is of course built with Jaws, and doesn’t appear to suffer this problem, so I guess I just need to work out how to use it properly.

If it turns out that I can’t do what I want with it, I guess I’ll keep looking.