Making my website - tools I experimented with.
As a new interactive media professional, I had to design my own website as a way to tell the world who I am and what I do. My coding skills are not that strong, so I knew that I needed help with designing my website. Given that Wordpress is big in website designing and nowadays a large number of businesses have their websites designed in Wordpress, I decided to give Wordpress a go.
I was disappointed and more so a little frustrated. I wasn’t too impressed with the variety of themes offered - I felt most of them had a similar structure - large picture above the fold followed by mostly the whole website as you scroll down. Next, I found it wasn’t very easy to use as I had to memorize steps when changing themes and I had to be careful with Child theme, Parent theme etc. Also, when I changed themes, I would lose my formatting and features that I had used in my previous theme and that would mean I would have to start from scratch and put more time in it. After changing my theme three times, I gave up on wordpress and moved on to Wix.com.
This was a free service with many attractive templates. It was easy to customize in Wix as it had drag and drop features. Also, it didn’t matter if I would change themes, all my formatting and features would easily transfer between themes which made life easier for me. But, the problems I ran into with Wix was that it was a bit glitchy. Sometimes some features would show up on a given template and some wouldn’t. And this wasn’t because I changed themes; it would just not show a feature I just added. I tried working around this problem because i really liked my free template but I had to give up on it, a I realized, it will not be worth it in the long run.
Next, I tried Squarespace. First, to sign up was far easier on Squarespace thaI liked the template, they looked sleeker and more professional compared to Wix and the best part was that it had some really cool features. First, the websites were responsive, second it had e-commerce features that I could add to my website if I chose to and it also had a traffic and data analysis function. Also, just like Wix, I could just drag and drop sections and the help function and tutorials were easy to follow. I found myself wasting less time using Squarespace and also enjoying the process. There was a price attached to this though. It was more expensive that the wordpress sites I had tried but because of the ease of use, professional look and feel of the site and the overall experience, I decided to stick with Squarespace even though I had to pay more.
In conclusion, out of the three website building sites, I would recommend Wordpress and Squarespace. Even though, I don’t prefer Wordpress, it does have tools and plug-ins like Search Engine Optimization, e-commerce plug-ins, contact forms etc. that are very beneficial for professionals and businesses. But, the advantage of Squarespace is that it is easy to use, has the e-commerce etc functions built in and I liked the design templates it had to offer compared to wordpress.