Any benefits in creating a "proper" website?

Of course using wordpress or blogger is way easier and they provide free hosting. Blogger is completly free. Wordpress require small charge if you want to post ads.

I'm a asp.net programmer. If you want to build software to sell to the IM community that is one thing.
If you are building a site for yourself, wordpress is fast, fast, fast. I suggest that once you find something you need in wordpress and can't find for free, build it and sell it or give it away for donations.

All other things being equal, a Wordpress site will supposedly rank higher than a non-WP site in Google.

I love the fact that Wordpress is an open-source CMS. I never run out of plugins, scripts, themes for my sites

You can place hurdles in the way of your SEO efforts by your choice and utilization of software. Out of the box Wordpress has a couple of small hurdles, one is the need to optimize the permalink structure and the other is the lack of options for creating page/post custom Meta tags.
The first can be overcome by simple research the second requires a plugin. From the people I encounter on a regular basis, both of those requirements are either unknown to them or they're incapable of implementing them due to some technical phobia.

So out of the box it's a mixed bag for SEO. As Alexa says above, Google likes fresh/regular content, so in some ways the inherent purpose of WP somewhat compensates for its weaknesses in creating a 'search engine friendly' website.

With the appropriate plugin and settings in place, it's as good as most other software/platforms on the market.

To answer the OP, I wouldn't try to reinvent the wheel by coding your own CMS. You'll never catch up with what WordPress provides and you'll certainly never catch up with them in terms of the availability of 3rd party plugins.

Hi Warriors I'm Priya Nembhard, I didn't find a place to introduce my so I'll say a quick hello here in my first post. regarding the question of ASP.net or wordpress, there's just no comparison in terms of speed, seo benefit, and ability to update/upgrade. Plus it's free unless you're doing self hosting version. My clients ask me this many times, and one concern I hear is that they don't want something else everybody else has like a cookie-cutter site. After I explain who's actually using wordpress and it's ease of use, they tend to change their minds very quickly. Someone mentioned mashable before, yes, and CNN, and other large media sites use wordpress in their blogging sections or for the entire site. It's come a long way and it's so user friendly compared to other platforms. To "theBeginner", you're definitely better off using it, it's now at version 3.3plus. Good luck.

Thanks guys.

Looks like a unanimous decision. Wordpress it is!

Just be sure to patch your site. Wordpress is renound for being hacked.

I would go with blogger because of the fast way to pretty nice rankings but as said before, you should know your skills , you can sell anything these days. (that if we are talking about selling it , not using for yourself)

If your site is going to offer some custom service which requires some work in the backend (like a SEO analyzer website), you will be better off building it with what you know (ASP.net). On the other hand, if all you want is to run a blog primarily focussing on delivering content, WordPress would be a much better option (no-need to re-invent the wheel).

Depends what you want to do..do you want to build a site with alot of functions or you want to build a regular site and get your stuff done.. how complex is your plan?

I use Joomla since it gives me more freedom of doing and moving things, I tried wordpress but I find it harder to use.. all my Joomla sites rank very well. Joomla has alot of plugins " not as much as wordpress tho but its more flexible

If you are after for a dynamic and easy to edit website, I suggest you to go for Wordpress but if you're kind of a person who wants to start everything from scratch then coding could be a great thing. The benefits of having a coded websites is you really understand the flow of details that run through the site since you are the one making it.

Use wordpress or whatever is simple for you.

I just throw up simple squeeze pages I make myself using templates and editing them with NVU.

I spend most of my time doing market and niche research to find a market that is both profitable and reachable by me. Once I put most of my attention on that, the rest got read easy.

I put up the squeeze page, build a list, market to the list and give them value and then after the fact, I add a wordpress blog but I only send my subscribers there after they sign up.

This has worked well for me and the only page I market/promote outside of my lists is the squeeze page.