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Which Platform for Blog?

Asked by mkol,

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mkol

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Hello

I had a blogger blog previously for providing IT services. Due to circumstances I deleted the blog, thinking I can restore any time in the future not knowing the 90 days time frame. Now my blog is gone for ever with it my content and everything. However looking at the situation I have a chance to embrace a new design and new website. I am looking for a good platform which is good for SEO and has access to the html code for the website.

What do you guys advise? I found Blogger top notch simple and tech worthy. Is there a platform better than blogger which is seo friendly and has tons of features. Or shall I get a domain name and design the site with site builder which domain companies provide now days.

My forte is hardware, software, networking and SEO area. I am not so good with designing website so I am looking for a simple solutions.

Thank you.

 

 

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Jack W

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WordPress.

 

You will simply not find a more open and extensible blog platform than WordPress.

 

Just go buy a domain, some shared hosting and install WordPress on it. It takes 5 minutes. You have full access to the code (HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP), as well as a marketplace of themes and plugins, all completely free.

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Jack W

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  On 24/05/2016 at 21:27, mkol said:

Thank you^

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No problem. :) Just ask if you need any help. My day job is 40% development of WordPress. I've even contributed fixes to WordPress core, as well as reviewed and approved themes that you find in the marketplace.

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MikeChipshop Member

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  On 24/05/2016 at 20:57, Jack W said:

WordPress.

 

You will simply not find a more open and extensible blog platform than WordPress.

 

Just go buy a domain, some shared hosting and install WordPress on it. It takes 5 minutes. You have full access to the code (HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP), as well as a marketplace of themes and plugins, all completely free.

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Seconded.

 

My day job finds me using all sorts of systems, Craft, Perch, Joomla, Drupal etc but i always end up back at WordPress for personal projects and it's always the first place i point clients looking for a blogging/CMS system.

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Jack W

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  On 24/05/2016 at 21:33, MikeChipshop said:

 

Seconded.

 

My day job finds me using all sorts of systems, Craft, Perch, Joomla, Drupal etc but i always end up back at WordPress for personal projects and it's always the first place i point clients looking for a blogging/CMS system.

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Yeah - we generally use it for the smaller clients, on a budget. It still gives room for advanced features, e.g ecommerce, galleries and live chat, but makes the development process far easier.

 

The only times we don't usually use WordPress is:

 

  1. It's a large corporation; although we do sometimes for mobile app backends, just for managing the content
  2. E-commerce; again, we do sometimes, if they don't require advanced e-commerce features such as stock control
  3. Large projects; we'll use Symfony for these things
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MikeChipshop Member

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  On 24/05/2016 at 21:37, Jack W said:
  1. It's a large corporation; although we do sometimes for mobile app backends, just for managing the content
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Have you had a chance to play with the REST API yet? Makes things like this soooo much better. I was pretty late to the API scene but totally hooked on it now.

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Jack W

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  On 25/05/2016 at 05:53, MikeChipshop said:

Have you had a chance to play with the REST API yet? Makes things like this soooo much better. I was pretty late to the API scene but totally hooked on it now.

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Nope. One of my colleagues has, but when looking at it, the API doesn't appear to be a stable feature yet. About a month ago, the core team members of WordPress were arguing over how to continue the API. If we're to begin using it, we need to know it will remain part of core and be finalised.

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HawkMan

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  On 24/05/2016 at 20:57, Jack W said:

WordPress.

 

You will simply not find a more open and extensible blog platform than WordPress.

 

Just go buy a domain, some shared hosting and install WordPress on it. It takes 5 minutes. You have full access to the code (HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP), as well as a marketplace of themes and plugins, all completely free.

Expand  

a lot of hosts also offer one click wordpress installs for those not techy. wordpress auto updates itself anyway after you install it though so it's a pretty painless thing once you get the database information and stuff. 

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MikeChipshop Member

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  On 25/05/2016 at 07:07, HawkMan said:

a lot of hosts also offer one click wordpress installs for those not techy. wordpress auto updates itself anyway after you install it though so it's a pretty painless thing once you get the database information and stuff. 

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I tend to advise against these one click installs. Fantastico et al can leave some pretty stupid security holes and even the config file for Fantastico can be used as a backdoor in if not deleted. Just a heads up.

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HawkMan

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  On 25/05/2016 at 07:12, MikeChipshop said:

I tend to advise against these one click installs. Fantastico et al can leave some pretty stupid security holes and even the config file for Fantastico can be used as a backdoor in if not deleted. Just a heads up.

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yeah, I prefer a proper install. but if you're not a web/tech guy, it's an option. 

it also depends on the host I'd say. My host shut down my whole site and told me what to do when I got compromised way back. not sure if that was a joomla site or the earlier variant. don't think it was a WP site anyway. Actually, it might have been my early e107 site. 

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MikeChipshop Member

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  On 25/05/2016 at 07:14, HawkMan said:

yeah, I prefer a proper install. but if you're not a web/tech guy, it's an option. 

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No, absolutely agree with you. Hosts that care would have all the patches up to date and bugs squashed any way, i mean, it'd kill their servers if they didn't!

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HawkMan

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I know my host offers one click wordpress, I'm not sure how patches are handled though. they have some galleries and ecomerce stuff as well as one click installs.  So not sure they you effectively get  WP install that patches itself through WP or if it's handled through their system.

 

I could test, but I already cleared my DB of some 10 different CMS prefix databases already last year or so form old installs of different stuff :p

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Anibal P

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  On 25/05/2016 at 07:14, HawkMan said:

yeah, I prefer a proper install. but if you're not a web/tech guy, it's an option. 

it also depends on the host I'd say. My host shut down my whole site and told me what to do when I got compromised way back. not sure if that was a joomla site or the earlier variant. don't think it was a WP site anyway. Actually, it might have been my early e107 site. 

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Blast form the past there! Haven't used or seen anything on e107 in a LONG time, used way back in the early beta days before I got lazy

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DevTech

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Software preferences are subjective.

 

Personally just about everything about the Wordpress architecture annoys me immensely. But if somebody else likes it, that's like how people listen to different music.

 

Even Wordpress doesn't like Wordpress and they are re-writing it in JavaScript which is a project I find interesting because it has two simultaneous challenges of changing from PHP to Javascript and also cleaning up the architecture at the same time. I hope they succeed!

 

I also find that people who are not familiar with web stuff, tend to find even Wordpress a bit overwhelming. Wordpress seems to appeal to the "web geek" for projects that don't need thinking. Wordpress is so easy for those guys that they recommend it to beginners without realizing it may not be suitable for everyone.

 

For a simple blog, a static site generator may be more than enough and usually works well with the lowest cost hosting and you always have a backup of the site on your own computer!

 

For Neowin people with a Microsoft preference, Wyam is a good static generator: http://wyam.io/

 

The most popular static generator is Jekyll: http://jekyllrb.com/

 

And for React fans there is Gatsby: https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby

 

Microsoft Azure has a free for forever 10 site web hosting tier that works well for sites with very low page views and you can auto-configure it for Wordpress. It's an easy way to try it out without any time pressure.

 

 

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DevTech

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  On 13/07/2016 at 11:32, th3rEsa said:

If you're interested in static site generators (I can totally recommend Pelican which might be the best static WordPress replacement available), there is a list of them:

http://www.staticsitegenerators.net

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That is a well surveyed list - most lists of things miss out on so much but not that one - excellent.

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