So I’ve been looking around, and I’ve seen that most Blender-heads use Word-Press for their websites or blogs (ex. Andrew Price, Durian, etc). However, I’ve recently come across Weebly - Quandtum uses it for his site.
I’m trying to figure out what to use for my site (I already have a blog on Blogger which I plan to link to my main website), so my question is : what is the comparison, and which should I choose in your opinion? Weebly seems to have a lot of options and according to their FAQ is quite easy to manage with their drag-and-drop system (which would be perfect for me) but WordPress seems to have a pretty strong base with the Blender community, with BlenderNation and Durian coming to mind. Kinda torn between the two…already have lots of ideas for the site such as a sort-of shop (which apparently Weebly already has options with which to set one up), and considering that’s going to be a big part of it, that aspect should be taken into consideration too I have to do a bit of reading about the shop-system though…
I used wordpress back when I was writing articles on Blendernation, its quite nice to use, very structured and professional, i have no experience with Weebly however so I cant do a comparison.
But Im in the same boat as you, making my own website at the moment and I want a newsfeed on the main page. So ive been looking into how to do that. Plus I already have a blog on blogger as well, so I thought it would be simple enough to just get that feed running on my site??
You say your going to get your blogger blog (which I have bookmarked btw :P) on your site, so why look into wordpress as well?
If you use Wordpress, your site will be well supported for a long time because so many people like and depend on it. Weebly might be cool but what’s it going to be like in a couple of years from now? Who knows. But I’ll bet Wordpress is still around even five years from now (and Drupal if you need more power.) http://drupal.org
So, if you want to make your website decision once and not have to do this all over again in a year or two, pick something FOSS and popular.
lol. Just share my experience. I’ve used both Wordpress (under the hood even, I’ve set up actual servers) and Weebly. Reason I used Weebly is because I’m rather tired from my webmaster days and wanted to be just a user. While I’m sure there are Wordpress hosts out there, I didn’t look for one. What had happened is I checked out Weebly, saw it was free, and just signed up for an account to see what it was like. It’s actually very cool and easy to use and re-organize things, even easier then Wordpress in my opinion. Don’t mistake me though, that’s not a rip on Wordpress (because I very much like it too). My site also probably took less than an hour to set up (and shamefully shows). Lots of nice features in Weebly too that you don’t have to know anything about to really make use of. I don’t know too much about the shop system though (I’ll try to see what I might be able to see a bit later if it helps).
As for things going under and having to move… well looking at Angelfire and Tripod from back in 1992 and the fact they are (miraculously) still alive, I don’t think it’s a large risk and I think the risk is more applied to the host not so much the system.
It’s free, can create an account and check it out (can maybe explore some of the shop system too). Don’t like it, can always cancel it. Either choice, you can’t really go wrong, they’re both good!
thanks for the great replies everyone! some good points…
@AD-Edge - well, I only have 12 registered followers and switching from Blogger to Wordpress could mean I could lose both those 12 followers and the anonymous readers…though with my limited knowledge of Wordpress I might be totally wrong :o could also depend on how I set it up, I guess…
@loopduplicate - Weebly shutting down is something I did think about…but looking at their statistics (+3 million users since 2007) I think they might last a while.
this will definitely take a while to figure out…I guess I should outline exactly what I want to do with the site and start from there, so far the only list I have is in my head.
so…trying out Weebly, and although it will take a while to get used to, I have to say…wow. It’s really, really simple. The actual template itself is kinda boring, I’d probably have to make my own in the editor or something, but really…wow :eek:
I might publish it just for fun and link it in here a bit later. I mean, I can always delete the whole thing and my account there afterwards, right?
edit - oh shoot…once I create a design, be it for Weebly or WordPress, I’ll have to duplicate it to Blogger… I had to fight with the current one when I set it up.
still experimenting to see what Weebly can do, and so far I think I’ve found the perfect place. I’d say that setting everything up is similar to how Blogger works, so I’m not having too much of a hard time. Succeeded in setting up a downloadable file with it’s own page, which is AWESOME, it’s exactly what I wanted :yes: now if only I could try out the shop-stuff without a GoogleMerchant or Paypal account, that would be awesome as well…
so I’m about to shut everything down for the night, but I’d like to leave you with this link to the testing site :yes: theme isn’t modified or anything, none of the visual aspects are, but the basic functionality seems to be implemented fairly well.
please try out the download link, curious to hear what it’s like on your end works fine here.
edit - I think I’ve made my decision… I was leaning towards Weebly a few hours ago, but now I think I’m going to be using a combination of both Weebly and WordPress (each one handling different aspects of the whole site)
re-edit - forget that last one…argh, this is tough
I have to do a bit of reading about the shop-system though…
I had to fight with the current one when I set it up.