I have been working on a few different versions of the same sites and have been comparing my needs with what is offered with each of these site infrastructures.
I started using Weebly.com.
I enjoyed the back-end interface; a little clunky, but the built in blog was easy to add info to AND it had the Facebook “Like” button and Twitter “Tweet” button built in automatically. The reason I moved away from Weebly was because there was no built in Search. I tried adding Google Search to the site, but to no avail. I am still not sure why. Plus, I didn’t like the idea of showing a “Google” search as advertising that I added this item in.
Next, I moved over to Orgfree.com. This hosting company allows free space and excellent integration of SQL databases to support for Joomla, WordPress, phpBB, simple machines forum, Drupal, and Moodle. Talk about excellent…and EASY.¹
I started with a Joomla.org installation.
The intention was to strip out all the unnecessary pages, categories, menus, sections and then add a plug-in or module for blogging, as this was my primary concern. The easy blog plug-ins were not easy to install. The more simple sounding ones all seemed to cost money. I was not impressed. Joomla has offered an excellent infrastructure for so many other modules. I decided to try to WordPress.org.
WordPress was like an angel sent from heaven. For all my needs it was easy to install, very intuitive to use, had a great blog, minus the “like” and “tweet” buttons, which I will look for later. So far, I am enjoying the interface and may show my students how easy it is to create an online blog for themselves soon enough.
¹Sidenote: I have recently had access problems to the back-end of my WordPress installation with Orgfree. I have emailed them multiple times to try to gain access to my account, but have not heard anything. I have switched to WordPress.com. I still think Orgfree is great to try out different website management interfaces. They just have not given me any support.
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I will keep everything in WordPress because it works well, has great stats, and enables me to aggregate all of my feeds from Tumblr, Twitter, and Scoop.it. I might look into whether my Instagram and Flikr video and photos can come through here as well. In my spare time, I hope to accomplish a few things with this site this year, namely:
education | technology | design 