Reborn! Creating This Site

So my web hosting was going to expire and I needed to renew for another year. I originally purchased my web hosting service from a friend I made at a SharePoint conference (Thanks BDC!). Back then, you purchased a host site and then it was up to you to design the pages. If anyone ever hit my old site you'd think it was pretty #LAME. I thought it was too. I don't even want to refresh my memory by describing it.

I was thinking of going with a personal subscription of SharePoint and leveraging the public site for my pages. Maybe - even put some of my work on display. Unfortunately, Microsoft has done away with offering the public facing site through SharePoint. Maybe that's not such a bad thing. For me, leveraging SharePoint to publish a blog and make a presence would be great, but it wouldn't be as snazzy as something like this. I had to look around. Microsoft had Wix listed as a recommended hosting provider.

I started looking at Wix and found it allow you to create a site for free. So I looked through the templates and I found one I like. I was floored at how easy it was to change the images, page layouts, colors, and fonts. After a few hours of tinkering I was able to create this site.

Before I heard of Wix, I heard of Squarespace, as they advertise on my local NPR station. So before I pulled the trigger, I wanted to check out Squarespace. They, also, had some stunning pages and looked easy to edit. Which one should I use? Decisions! Decisions! Aghh!!!

My next step was look for someone's review of the two products. The review I read concluded that Squarespace better looking sites but fewer starting templates while Wix has more templates, but they aren't as esthetically pleasing. There were a lot of similarities, but the bottom line for me was that there is more flexibility on where you put the content on the page. I like that flexibility, so I went with Wix.

To be honest, I started trying to modify a Squarespace page but I quickly gave up. Not because I thought it was hard, but because i had already had put some effort into my Wix site and really liked it. I found it easy enough to use and it had the right price point for the features I wanted. Before you make your decision, check a few reviews, weigh the pros and cons, and then take the dive!

Cheers,

Carlos