Curious?

JWCrowder

I am curious about other people's process of web design. I consider myself a novice, but then again, most people cannot create any website, thus the popularity of social media. How do most on here create their websites? Do you use Wordpress for your entire structure? I personally use WYSIWYG Web Designer for my primary structure. For regularly updated information, I "window" in Wordpress. Also, I incorporate google calendar, but I would love to find a free alternative. I also incorporate some other scripts. My plan is now on e-panel and working great. However, I run another hosting plan for someone that may have to go to the other option due to the softaculous support.

Will

JWCrowder This is probably meant more for client discussion, but I'll weigh in on a couple points:

ePanel.pro is now MediaServe.pro for what that's worth. We were originally planning a separate hosting brand so we went with something more generic for panel branding, but then backed off and branded the new panel with the MediaServe name. I'm glad you're liking it so far despite the cPanel > Enhance migration difficulties (much better now BTW)!

This new panel (from https://enhance.com) has new installers for Joomla and Magento in the works (should arrive by January) and going forward additional installers. It's definitely not Softaculous but we are planning to provide Installatron Server as an apps installer to work with Enhance which might be solution for your other website.

We also now provide Kopage free with the new panel (the new mediaserve.com was redone with Kopage in fact!) It is by far the best website builder we've worked with! You can preview Kopage templates at https://kopage.mediaserve.pro

Neil

JWCrowder

I use WordPress a lot using lightweight themes like GeneratePress. The Twenty-TwentyFound WP theme is also very versatile.

JWCrowder

Will Thank you for replying! The more information we get about the new systems the better!

JWCrowder

Neil Thank you! Part of the problem with WP is the vast abundance. It becomes difficult to decide what to use to get what you want to present.

Neil

JWCrowder

I agree. You can narrow it down by knowing what is important to you and your business (website).

I go for mobile-first designs/themes (responsive or mobile-friendly is past). Saying this: I need to apply these to my websites, which are mobile-friendly but not mobile-first. This aligns with what Google says about the recent update: Mobile-First index.
Next simplicity or ease of use as some things are too complicated to navigate and use at the backend. The simpler the better.
Free themes if possible or affordable ones at least.

Those are the things I look into. The design follows after having those 3 above. 🙂

maspick

I've been doing this since 1995, and have always hand-coded the sites I build. I now have components I've built to make quick CMSs for my clients.

Neil

maspick That is really great.

Will

maspick Nice! Your work predates MediaServe! (which began as sqlvision.com in 1999.)

IshkabibbleBooks

Using Kopage to build my sites has been awesome! It took some getting used to since I came from building from scratch, but even though the content blocks have some limitations, it's great that they're already formatted to display properly on computers, tablets and phones. It's saved so many headaches. And there's enough variety in the available templates and content blocks that I've barely had to use the feature that lets you design a content block from scratch.

DLT101

This sounds really interesting! I've been thinking about migrating away from Wordpress, because it is so high maintenance. Clearly that will take some research, since some of my Wordpress stuff is fairly advanced at this point. Has anyone else done this kind of rebuild? Anything you know of that would help? Anything I should look out for?

Neil

DLT101 I had migrated from WordPress to static site generators maybe 3 times already in the past. But only to come back to WordPress because of the following:

CMS I am used to.
I am used to the plugins and functionalities.
Perhaps more on this because it was hard to learn new things with the time I had for my sites.

Then, I began to question why I was moving out of WP; my answer was because of page speed.

But with LiteSpeed cache right now, I think I am going to stick with WordPress.

Kopage, though is very easy to use as I have tried it, and best for info sites (not for eCommerce and customized functionalities, as far as I know). But I am not an expert on this, so this is basically just an opinion.