I have had a lot of experience using WordPress over the past four years at the University of Mary Washington. I have found that WordPress is a powerful tool when coming to creating websites. WordPress allows for quick and easy theme, menu, or photo changes, while Jerkyll does not. A benefit of using WordPress is that you do not need to know anything about coding to be able to manipulate the content on your site. The simplicity of this tool also comes with limitations, although, you can manipulate some portions of the site using html or css there will always be parts of the site in which you cannot edit due to the theme defaults.

The following shows the front-end and the back-end of my personal WordPress powered site.

It is clear that the back-end or dashboard is more user friendly for those non-programmers. A visible issue with this setup is that you cannot see any code making it difficult or impossible to attach addition databases or functionality to the site.

Below is the back-end of the current Jerkyll powered site. As you can see it is not as appealing to the eye as a WordPress site would be. Still, Jerkyll is fairly simple to use, it allows you to create post or pages without writing in html or css. Using Jerkyll allows for html code to be accessible and adjustable to the needs of the programmer. Although there are no fancy tools such as spell-check Jerkyll is a very good choice for beginner web designers.

Lastly, the following is the back-end of a Flaskified site called “Where In The World” in which you can search different cities and countries within the database. This site can easily be altered, given you know HTML. Since, you only have access to the raw code, one must write
information in HTML to be displayed onto the site. Databases can easily be attached using in a Python server.

All in all, these three methods are great for developing a website. Depending on your needs one or more of these options could benefit you more than another when developing a website.