Sitebuilders

My Sitebuilding Journey

There's lots of ways to build a website, some technical, some complicated, some complex and yet some not so hard

If you're a coder you can't imagine building a site with something like Wordpress or a Sitebuilder but if you're the average Joe you may not feel that way. Even

though I did code my first site start to finish in HTML I would never do it again and trust me this site was nothing to speak of than it was a site and it was live on

the internet. I wish I knew coding better but fortunately for me and millions of others there is Softaculous and other script installers and Sitebuilders that can

help us realize our own web prescence.

I've used Wordpress, although is was a while ago, at that time setup after installation was time consuming and tedious and there were a lot things if you wanted to

change you had to dig into the coding to make the changes. It may have become easier, but seriously, as a non-techie it couldn't have gotten much harder. It was then that I started looking toward sitebuilders and at that time (2006) there wasn't a whole heck of a lot to pick from. I think RVSitebuilder was just getting started and it was nothing like it is to today.

My first sitebuilder was Kompozer, it's still around, I don't know if it's still being developed or not. I liked it, it was all HTML and did a nice job and a decent site could be built. But HTML was going to the wayside by way of PHP and development of Kompozer had stopped so I had to look for something else which led me to Soholaunch. It was in it's infant stages and was not very good, it was template driven and mods were hard, I didn't like it so it was back to offline sitebuilders and I found Web Dwarf. Now this was truly an excellent sitebuilder but it was only meant for a single page site, so building an entire site was cumbersome. Then I bought Sitespinner and the Pro version from Virtual Mechanics Inc. who also developed Web Dwarf. But things were changing again and web sites needed to be responsive to display on phone and tablet screens.

Break Points

The way to a responsive site in the early days was to use break points and there's still sitebuilders that use that method. Now maybe it was me, but break points

didn't work worth a you know what. Then builders started to hit the air waves that would produce a site that displays perfectly on everything, which I could never get break points to do. This is when RVSitebuilder started to look really appealing. RV has always done a good job but early on there was very little cusomization that could be done.

That element kept getting better but it became more and more difficult to use. Finally at the time of this writing (2024) that the latest version 7? was very non intuitive for me

and I had to move on again.

So here I am with Kopage, it's early on right now so I can't make an honest overall rating but so far I like it. After choosing the template you can pretty much jump right in and start doing stuff. It's very intuitive, I was able to publish a couple pages with a contact page within an hour of starting, I defintely can't say that about any of the other builders.