Was hoping someone could help me with a recommendation....if I wanted to build a decent personal website, is there a program that you would suggest, or are the free templates the ISP's provide as good as anything? Content is nothing too fancy - maybe show some videos, do a blog, post some comics, with a nice presentation to the whole thing. Any ideas? Thanks!
I'd go with Wordpress. It's free. It's what powers the blog on my sites (plug: http://www.cookbookpeople.com/blog/) and there are thousands of free templates to choose from. You can do static pages and blog posts. And like Firefox, there's an enormous community of developers that build all kinds of crazy bells and whistles to pimp yo' place. You can have Wordpress host it for free, or you can pay to have somebody else host it (and have more control). I use GoDaddy for hosting. For personal use, though, Wordpress hosting it makes sense.
BTW--I would definitely NOT go with the ISP's template. That generally sucks, because if they piss you off (raise prices, crappy service) or they go bankrupt, you can be screwed. You want to be able to move your site to a new host at a moment's notice. One of the reasons I think "cloud computing" is a bunch of bunk. It makes sense for some applications, but when you get down to it, do you really want to couple your valuable data to a monthly rental fee? No thanks.
What's the advantage with blogger? Why'd you switch? I'm always wondering if the grass is greener elsewhere.
I started on Godaddy with Wordpress, liked that quite a lot. My site looks essentially the same on blogger that it did on wordpress. Then I moved it onto S2 trying to integrate it in here. But there were quite a few problems with that, first it had to be sportstwo.com/dabullz, which hurts brand name a lot, the drupal software is completely inferior to wordpress/blogger, there were problems with a "more" link that didn't seem to have a resolve, S2's software was locking out viewers from viewing the site, and I was getting lots of emails to switch the site back. So I moved it onto google blogger, and have it hosted there for the time being. I'll eventually move it back to some different hosting. Here's a link to my site: http://www.dabullz.com/ The one thing that blogger has on wordpress is the google adsense integration. The second thing is, some of the widgets seem to be a bit better than wordpresses. And the search functionality on blogger is better. But things I like about wordpress are categories and pages. Those are good in site building, but definitely not necessary in what I'm doing with my site right now.
BTW--nice looking site. You really ought to use title tags and description tags, though. It'll help you a lot in getting noticed by search engines. Read up on SEO (search engine optimization) and you'll see what I mean. There's a really handy Wordpress widget for SEO--probably is one for blogger too.
I use blogger. Integrates well with Gmail account and flexibility with other publishing forms...flickr, youtube, etc. being able to post by phone, etc.
I moved my site back to wordpress (plug: http://dabullz.com/ ). I like the way you can customize the theme like I do on my site. mook, do you know of a plugin that lets you insert adsense ads between posts?
I have never used adsense on my sites, as I really want to just focus on selling my own stuff. (I drop an insane amount of money on Adsense to be on other people's sites though). Looks like some interesting possibilities here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search.php?q=adsense
