Choosing A Platform For Your Website

Once you got your domain name and web hosting sorted out, it is time to decide on the platform to build your website on. It is a very important decision to make as it can be a source of frustration and waste of time and effort if you find that the platform you are using falls short in many areas down the road.

Which platform to use depends a lot on the type of website that you are going to set up?

If you are looking to create one page landing sites or multi-pages mini sites, you can use Dreamweaver or FrontPage to design and create HTML web pages for your websites. For blogs, you can go for popular blogging platforms such B2Evolution, Expression Engine, Movable Type, Text Pattern and WordPress. I highly recommend using WordPress if you are going to start a blog.

For a content heavy site, you can use either Drupal or Joomla to do so. Drupla and Joomla will be good for creating e-commerce sites, membership sites or content heavy sites which need a good CMS (Content Management System). When I first started out online, I used Joomla to create most of my sites. One thing I like about Joomla is the vast number of free templates and plugins available just like WordPress.

For forums, you have a choice of forum platforms such as vBulletin, Invision Power Board, phpBB and SMF. The latter two are free whereas vBulletin and Invision Pwer Board are paid platforms. I have had experiences with vBulletin, phpBB and SMF and I can highly recommend using them. As for Invision Power Board, although I do not have any experience using it, is highly recommended by a lot of webmasters. If you are looking to build a forum site, you can give these few forum platforms some serious consideration.

Personally for me, I used WordPress for all my blogs, Joomla for content heavy sites and vBulletin and SMF for my forums. In recent months, I start to convert existing sites to the WordPress platform. As WordPress is becoming more and more powerful and flexible to use for all types of sites, I find it the perfect platform to use on all my sites.

I have compile a list of recommended software platform below that you can use for your sites.

Blogs
• B2Evolution
• Expression Engine
• Movable Type
• Text Pattern
• WordPress

Content Heavy / Ecommerce / Membership Sites
• Drupal
• Joomla
• Wordpress

Forum
• Invision Power Board
• phpBB
• SMF
• vBulletin