Web design made easy...or is it?

Website Publishing Madness

There are so many sites in cyber-world to help you create and maintain your own website, Google sites, Wordpress, Wix, and SquareSpace just to name a few.  Being that I wanted to create my own website to host an online portfolio I wadded into this abyss.  First, I should tell you that I have zero experience with web design and HTML, Java and CSS...nor do I speak speak Klingon, so I figured I had my work cut out for me.  I thought I would share with you some of the little things that I have learned from playing around with these various web building and hosting services.  I will spare you all from a tedious play-by-play and instead provide a very broad overview.  What I will tell you is that all of these services (Google Sites, WordPress, Wix and SquareSpace all do certain things very well, and if I had a magic wand I would take the integration of Google Sites, and combine it with Wix's cool design and ease of use, and throw in the utility of WordPress.  But wait, who am I kidding?  This is the last thing I would do if I had a magic wand!  I mean who even needs the internet on a tropical paradise with every need being attended to? Oops, there I go again getting off track, back to the issue at hand.

I did not want to spend a lot of money (I mean who does?) so I started with Google Sites, which came recommended by several friends who had already began the web building adventure.  Now these friends are great, very knowledgeable but afterwords I learned that NONE of them use Google Sites, they are all Dreamweaver snobs who meant well, but I digress.  I started with Google sites and found it to be fairly straight forward and very easy to use.  I had a decent site up and running fairly quickly, and if I wanted a basic site, with few bells and whistles I would have been content.  I soon learned that Google Sites is fairly limited as far as really customizing your site.  You are stuck with basic themes and global settings that cannot be changed from page to page.  I also did not like the options for inserting a photo gallery, you are pretty much limited to using the Google Gadgets, that in turn use Picasa.  I was not a big fan of dropping a Picasa slide show as my gallery.

Google Sites:

Pros:

• Easy to use, fast to set up
• Bang for your buck, you get a lot of functionality for zero cost!
• Integrates nicely with other Google products
• Has a large following and easy to find support
• Easy to incorporate you own domain name

Cons:

• Limited in design customizations
• Limited to rely on open source Google Gadgets
• Difficult to incorporate photo galleries (at least the way I wanted them)
• I could not get it to work well on multiple browsers- it was very browser dependent look liked crap on a mobile device.

Bottom line:  Great for the beginner!  The place to start and get comfortable with web design, though you may find it is limiting after you get some skills.

Off to WordPress to see what was available there.  I did not care for the Blog orientation of WordPress, again I felt limited in the design and found that all the cool designs were "premium" and I was not all that excited about paying for them.  I should qualify my rant by stating that I abandoned using WP after about three days, a few hours a day messing around with it.  There is a lot of stuff out there for WP, and there is a huge community, this was both good and bad...how could this be bad you wonder?  Well I found that having so much out there can be a bit overwhelming.

WordPress:

Pros:

• A tried and true product, with lots of support and functionality
• A great platform for blogging
• Hundreds, probably even thousands, of themes to choose from
• Very easily updated and maintained (really good app for that!)
• Easy to incorporate your own domain

Cons:

• Much more time intensive than Google Sites or Wix
• Many of the great themes were "premium" ones that you had to pay for.
• Appeared to be many hidden costs, if you are not careful you can get nickel and dime'd to death.
• Can be overwhelming, especially if you do not have a strong base in HTML
• Was not crazy about the dedication to the blog layout.

Bottom line:  If you have time and or knowledge a great product!  You just have to be a bit more into it to get the most out of WP.

Look for my next post to hear (do you really hear?  I guess you read) what I have to say about Wix!

have a good one!