This week added additional insights to my understanding of site builders and and hosts. Ultimately, I decided that I would prefer to have the power and flexibility of a content management system instead of just the simplicity of a site builder. I narrowed my two choices down to either WordPress or Squarespace.
Initially, I was leaning towards Squarespace. Their sites look incredibly sleek and many users claim that it is just as easy to use as traditional site builders. But at the end of the day, my mind was changed to go with WordPress.
The popularity of WordPress has created an enormous community of developers who can essentially answer any question that might come up. This means that if you’re experiencing a specific problem, somebody else has probably already run into it and offered a solution. There is also an enormous variety of plugins offered to create your site in diverse ways. In addition to all of this, WordPress allows users to completely own their content and download all of their site’s databases and files. These options are not fully supported in Squarespace, from my understanding.
At the end of the day, WordPress may not be the easiest to learn out of all of the available options. But like Brother Scott said, if you speak WordPress, you will always have work. It is a very desirable skill to put on resumes and I think it’s worth the time and effort to learn how to utilize this popular tool.
After researching hosts, HostGator won me over. They offer incredible speeds and features for a great promotional price. In the following weeks, I’ll be actually using these technologies, so I’ll be able to give my honest opinion about if they live up to the research I’ve done.