Challenge: How I chose the best site platform in 7,328 days
Start
It all started with an interest in the Internet and trying to find a place for myself on it).
My first html and css lessons at school, reading articles in newspapers and logging on to the internet through the phone network (to the sounds of a horror movie). Naturally, I wanted to do something with all this knowledge. So I made my first personal page on FrontPage. Who remembers such a dinosaur from Microsoft?)
Traffic + Virality
Then there were experiments with the www.livejournal.com blog. It was a cozy personal blog with 20–30 subscribers. Naturally, it was a free service which did not provide any statistics on visits and other stuff.
But it was the blog that gave me an idea of how traffic and virality worked. I wrote a comic post about the election and it was reposted by a popular blogger on Twitter. And a couple of days later, I found out that someone else (besides my friends) had read the post. I heard some student talking about it to his friends as I was getting my jacket in the university checkroom.
When I got home, I didn’t hesitate to turn on power of my intel pentium 200mmx, my monitor, take mouse with the wheel in my hand and find the blogger’s repost (from 3 days ago). Immediately I bought a plan, which showed the statistics of visits. Do you also look at the number of likes and the reach?))
I waited a day and saw the statistics — it was about 30 000 visits for that day. And then every day it was half less. So the first day after the repost, there were about 100,000 hits. It is clear that nowadays such coverage with Ticktock will not surprise anyone)). But back then it was wow for me!
Wait, I forgot about the facebook and instagram guys — they’d give a kidney for that kind of free coverage).
Easy blogging life
Then I used Egea www.blogengine.ru — a super simple, fast and cute blogging engine.
Internet Hell
After it I had experience using www.wordpress.org (for more demanding tasks than just blogging), but its interface and constant inconsistencies in plugins after egea seemed like hell. So the search continued and was found intuitive site-building platform www.tilda.cc For a couple of years all the issues were solved with it.
The Future (almost)
At the moment there were new problems with cms, db and scalability. So I went back to wordpress. Hell stayed hell for me personally (but I know someone likes it hotter). I discovered www.elementor.com, it allows me to walk through wordpress almost without getting burned. Elementor’s site-building structure is based on blockiness. And that’s handy enough.
But the consistency of the plugins (which are developed by separate teams) still confused me and the search continued.
The Future
And the solution was found — www.webflow.com And at the moment I am completely satisfied with it.
- The principle of blockiness as in Elementor.
- It has a modern and user-friendly interface.
- All you need from one developer.
- Fully on the site can work as a designer and a developer.
- If something is missing — a huge number of integrations with other full-featured services.
- The best online university: webflow.grsm.io/101course. Each lesson lasts about 1–2 min. You can learn very quickly how everything works.
- Cms
- I checked which of the more or less serious developers trust this platform: upwork.com, jasper.ai and so on. Not bad.
The only downside to webflow is that it is not as free as wordpress. But wordpress with elementor and other separate plugins is not free either. This, of course, my practicality and avarice)) calms me down.
If you have cool alternatives — happy to hear and try. 🙌
Updated:
for the sectarians who agonize with the wordpress interface but continue to love it because of its other significant perks.
In webflow you can make a site, download all the files with good code and from them make a template for wordpress (some even sell such templates). This can be done by wordpress’s workflow plugin or https://www.udesly.com
Good luck your way!)
