Building a Website

It all depends on what you want to do. Wordpress is easy to use. You should give it a shot. There are ton of information on how to get started.

Real question is what you want to do. Once you have an answer, you can pick the right tool set.

Goldbear,

Some websites are built using content management systems (i.e. Wordpress sites, Joomla Sites and Drupal sites are common). Others are built from scratch.
The term “straight HTML” is not something I’ve heard a lot but I assume it is meant to describe a site that was not built using a CMS (although that’s kind of funny because virtually no sites are built with only HTML).
If you aren’t tech savvy and want to build a website, I’m not sure any solution will work for you. Even setting up a site using a CMS requires knowledge of domain configuration and FTP programs. Some hosts provide easy ways to set up a CMS through their cPanel dashboards though.
Your best bet is to build a site on a CMS like Wordpress. It is easy enough to do if you don’t have a lot of experience and there is tons of tutorials and other support around the web.

Here is a pretty good tutorial on how to launch a wordpress site,

How to Launch a Self-Hosted WordPress Blog in 20 Minutes or Less [Screencast, v. 2.0] | Michael Hyatt

Hope that helps,

Shawn

WordPress: The best and by far most popular CMS (dynamic 'Content Management System', i.e. builds pages on-the-fly from page parts with a built-in database). WordPress is best for search engines and easier than Joomla or Drupal (they are better for newspaper sites, directory sites, etc.).

WordPress was originally a blog, but now can make "websites" as well. That is, it can now make both static "website pages" and dynamic "blog posts". Comes with free "Themes" to control look & feel. But paid commercial themes are more flexible, safer and better. I like the stuff from StudioPress.com. There are also themes just for marketers. WordPress uses "Plugins" to extend functionality and you will need several. There are also plugins just for marketers. Themes and plugins can be swapped in or out at will. WordPress has a built in editor which is supposed to make it easy for novices to add their own content (no web developer needed). However, for the best formatting and best looks, you need to know some HTML and CSS. It's not as easy as people like to think.

"Straight HTML" - By which you mean a "static" traditional HTML website uses HTML, CSS and JavaScript. These are usually built with a web page tool like Adobe Dreamweaver, with a serious learning curve. However, a static site (not being pre-built like WordPress) can be made to do just about anything.

By "Optimizer site", not sure what you mean. Static and dynamic (Dreamweaver type and WordPress type) are all there is. Some tools for newbie internet marketers may "make a site for you" - maybe that's what you mean. I'm not expert on those.

Hope this helps...
_jim coe

Agree with all. WordPress is a very good platform to use beginning, intermediate or advanced. You can set up a new site fairly easily. There are free themes, of course, but also many great paid themes that work well right out of the box.

WordPress also allows customization. So even though you may not be tech savvy yourself, you may find down the road that you want something done on your site that isn't already part of the theme. This way you could hire someone that knows HTML or PHP, which is what WordPress code is written with, that can do some customization for you since WordPress is open source. Good luck!

Wordpress is great,there are a lof of free tools which will help you.

I think you should go with WordPress. It's easy going and there are themes and plugins for any things to come. You can get lots of free tutorials and even whole WP websites, just give Google a try ;-)

Good luck!

If you are not too tech savvy then I would suggest you go Wordpress. It's basically like browsing through the internet. Yes you can do a lot of complicated things with it but if you just want to create a simple blog, maybe add a picture here and there, then Wordpress is the best for you.

Going the HTML route is actually more complicated since you have to know a bit of development work there.

Another WordPress fan here. It's easy to get started and you don't need to learn any HTML coding.

If you are not tech savvy, Wordpress is the way to go. In order to create a nice looking, well organized html site, you need to be more tech savvy than it takes to create a Wordpress site. You can use wsiwyg editors for html, but without knowing what you are doing, the results will probably look pretty amateurish.

There are a lot of Wordpress tutorials, so anything you don't know, there's probably a free video to show you how to do it.

I think that nobody who replied above understands what you mean by "optimizer web site", Mike - and I also don't. Are you possibly referring to "Optimize Press"? (It's a WordPress theme, which many people use for building sales pages and/or squeeze pages.)

optimize press is going to need wordpress setup. It's a theme lol.

Wordpres is good OP. It allows so much control that you will absolutely love the way it works. For an intermediate user all it takes is 15-20 minutes to setup your site with all the plugins and meta info.

word press blog site - simple point & click, drag & drop way to create web sites quickly. Lots of plug ins to take care of heavy programming tasks.

an optimizer web site - do you mean optimse press? - If so then this makes creating sales pages easy.

straight html site - need to know html to create the site unless you use a tool like dreamweaver.