Comparative Website Development

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Each method of creating a site came with its challenges. WordPress was difficult to navigate and create unique changes to your website allowing it to feel like your own while doing well in providing graphically pleasing designs. To the opposite of WordPress, GitHub allowed for greater freedom in customizing your website, so long as you knew how to code and had an idea for your site. The biggest issue I had with GitHub Pages is that I didn’t know, and still don’t know how to properly organize the lines of code or the CSS.

I had difficulties with WordPress when trying to have the site act in a certain way. I struggled with making a post only visible on the home page and ended up resolving it by creating a brand-new page. This difference between the dashboard and the customization tab is also confusing. However, the way elements were displayed eventually worked and would work across devices, unlike GitHub.

On my monitor, I was able to get my GitHub page to look how I wanted with quite a bit of work. However, the site hasn’t translated well to smaller screens. I likely added an element in the CSS that is hurting the rest of the page, but that is a problem for future William to deal with. HTML and CSS were a lot of troubleshooting, and while I didn’t mind it too bad, others might have found this more difficult. I had the most difficulty operating with the justify and align properties of CSS.

To operate WordPress, I think a familiarity or being guided through the site would be the most beneficial to learning how to develop the site. I had already been introduced to WordPress through Professor Hartung at PSU Behrend before Digit 100 and knew of its limitations. Adobe Spark does a better job at creating a website with only half the functionality. PSU WordPress also is different from WordPress, meaning any materials to learn likely come through PSU. When using it as a blog or to post updates on a lengthy project, it is superior to HTML for its simplicity.

Many sources teach how to code in HTML and CSS, and likely every problem I could ever encounter has been asked and solved before. As well, there are thousands of sites where you can look into the code to learn how a professional site might be organized. Using GitHub Pages to create a site provides so much freedom of expression that isn’t possible with WordPress, at the expense of learning how to code.

I want to continue developing a site using GitHub Pages because I plan to use it as a personal site in the future. Design-wise, I want to change a lot, but I would prefer to work on how to make the site accessible on smaller screens.