What Do I Create My Site With

There are so many different ways to create a website, but we are going to focus on just a handful.

An easy way to get up and running fast is to select the right platform for your site.

The platforms we will go over here include:

• Site Builder (Weebly)
• Wordpress
• Drupal
• Jekyll

Site Builder (Weebly)

Weebly is one of many site builders out there on the web and is one of the easiest to use. It allows you to create professional looking websites with minimal effort and no knowledge of coding.

Benefits

The drag and drop editor interface allows for easy placement of numerous page elements.

Weebly supports many different kinds of sites, such as blogging, membership, e-commerce, and portfolios.

There is an excellent choice of free templates. They also allow for custom templates to be used from a third party. If you know what you are doing in HTML and CSS, any template can be customized to fit your needs.

Sites running on the Weebly infrastructure are fast to load, especially when used with a service such as Cloudflare. Also, the pages get crawled and indexed easily by search engines.

An app marketplace includes many free and premium apps to extend the functionality of your site. If you wanted to, you could make your own app for use on yours, or the sites of others.

Downsides

The site is hosted on Weebly’s infrastructure, so you don’t have control over the servers. Sometimes that is a good thing.

Not having to worry about how the hardware is setup and run can let you focus on your business. On the other hand, if you need more complex functionality for your site, Weebly may not be for you.

SSL certificates are only included with the Business plan and higher. I have read this may be changing in a future update, but as of this writing, it hasn’t.  These have become critical for security, search ranking, and performance reasons.

A backup option is included for pages, but not for blog posts. Should a failure occur and their database backups were affected, you may lose that post data.

An option to backup the entire site yourself would be to use a tool that periodically crawls the site and saves the web pages and files. My favorite tool for this purpose is httrack.

Wordpress

Wordpress got its start as an easy to use tool for blogging. It has since expanded into being a fully capable content management system (CMS) and framework.

Benefits

It has a relatively simple to use interface and a great authoring experience for writing content. After all the changes in Wordpress in recent years, it hasn’t lost touch with the core experience.

The administrative interface may take a short time to get used to, but it’s easier to use than many other CMS software out there.

As Wordpress is the number one CMS out there right now, there is a vast, community and there is a lot of information out there on it.

The community has developed a huge number of plugins to extend the core system in just about any way you can imagine.

A large community can find and patch issues quickly, making the project more secure.

It can handle very simple and complex sites alike. It can be hosted on your own server, server space you rent, or with a company offering specialized managed services.

Almost any kind of site you can imagine can be created in Wordpress.

Downsides

With the popularity of Wordpress, the need to constantly stay up to date with the core system and plugins is crucial. As soon as a security issue is known, there may be many people looking to exploit that on outdated sites.

Custom sites and themes can get pretty complex and harder to manage. The simpler the site, and more plugins used from the community, the better. These are regularly updated and don’t require you to hire a developer.

Drupal

Drupal is a content management system and framework that can be used to build a large variety of websites.

Benefits

Drupal is well known for its flexibility and developer friendly hook system. Complex sites thrive here.

A huge community of people and thousands of modules to extend functionality make building any website a much easier task.

It is known for being very secure. As with any open source software, staying on top of security updates is essential to the continued security of your site.

The security team not only works with updates to the core system, but helps module authors to make sure their code is secure.

Scalability is a big plus for Drupal. It can easily run on a single server or grow to scale across thousands.

Some of the largest sites in the world run on Drupal. A couple of examples are weather.com and the white house site.

The community guidelines and approval process for modules enforce best practices in coding.

Downsides

Drupal is known for being difficult to learn. The administrative system is very flexible, but complex. The ability to add custom functionality is extremely flexible, but with that, comes complexity.

Installing the software can be difficult with a complex site. A simpler site is much easier to install, but still, has more steps to it than competing software systems.

As with other CMS software, keeping the site up to date is essential to the continued security.

Jekyll

The most popular static site generator out there is Jekyll. It is an excellent way to have the benefits of a static site while maintaining some of the functionality of a CMS.

Benefits

Jekyll sites are extremely secure because they are static sites. There are no databases or script code on the server side to make it vulnerable.

Since the files only contain HTML and CSS, it is very fast and can handle a large amount of traffic.

The community for static site generators is still fairly small, but growing quickly. Jekyll has the largest community amongst competing software.

When using versioning software, an easy backup system is already in place.

Many companies provide free hosting services for Jekyll sites. The best known one is GitHub.

Writing is done in Markdown, which is a very simple syntax for creating content.

Downsides

The technical nature of Jekyll configuration can be difficult for people who are not familiar with the command line or configuration files.

There is no dynamic content. Any user generated content or feedback needs to be handled with the help of a server or software as a service vendor.

While the community of developers for plugin solutions is growing, there aren’t enough solutions out there to handle near as many use cases as a CMS can.

Writing content in markdown takes some getting used to. In recent months, there have been many sites popping up to make this easier by providing a CMS like experience for the end user, while maintaining the flexibility for the developer.

Which Platform Should I Choose?

The platform you choose is very much dependent on the needs of your site and your technical expertise.

The platforms above are listed in order of complexity. The Weebly site builder is the easiest to use, while Jekyll requires the most technical knowledge.

A complex and high traffic site would benefit most from using Wordpress or Drupal.

Jekyll is probably the best for a simple, fast, and secure site.