Lets begin by addressing my personal experience with blog creation and the reason behind my selection of Weebly as a hosting platform.
In the past I have had experience with both Blogger and Wordpress (.com & .org) all three are excellent platforms for hosting blogs and offer a great deal of customization and support. For this project I wanted to try something new, experiment with a platform I have not had any experience on already. The contestants in this race were Tumblr, Squarespace, Drupal, and Weebly.
- Tumblr - Very easy to use from what I have seen. Unfortunately it feels more appropriate for bloggers who will be sharing large quantities of photos or art. Seems to lack that professional appeal I am looking for.
- Squarespace - This platform was a close second to Weebly. It has excellent ease of use for the common user and has a wide variety of designs to choose from. Honestly it was a real flip of the coin as to which I went for with this project. Weebly won the toss.
- Drupal - Great for coders, tons of free add-on that come with the free subscription, and an excellent support community. Ended up being a little too involved than what I wanted. Sure coding is fun and you get a lot of control, but there are other more pressing projects that need my coding skills.
In the end Weebly took the victory. It has an extremely user friendly drag and drop interface, lots of positive reviews, css/html editing if I want to get fancy, and overall you get a lot at the free subscription level.
The creation process was a relaxing and enjoyable experience. You begin by creating a website, picking the design elements, basic layout, etc. Once I had the layout complete I created a blog page, deleted the homepage, and set my blog as home. I then came up with a title and put together a header banner in ADOBE Photoshop. After that it was an easy drag and drop process of implementing a personal photo on the blog and about pages, adding a LinkedIn button, adding a little text, and finally this blog post.
If you are ever looking for a platform to create your own personal website or blog and don't want to deal with all the coding I highly recommend checking out Weebly.