New websites - what am I really getting into?

• Online blog publishing tools - examples include TypePad and Blogger
• Online website builders - examples include Weebly and Yola
• Free hosting companies
• Paid development
• Open source software - examples include Drupal and Joomla

How you decide on which option to take, like most things in life, depends on what you need. For example, if you've just got a hankering to write down your thoughts, or moan about the neighbour and his dog and nothing more, then it's likely that one of the blog publishing tools is suitable. If you want to take over the world then taking the blog publishing route will be a challenge.

Each option has strengths and weaknesses and some should be given a wide berth as a general rule. Let's take a quick look at how they compare:

Blog publishing tool

Website builders

Free hosting services

Paid development

Open source software

Maybe you can spot the pattern? Whatever route you take you are incurring some sort of cost - either in the form of time, effort, or money. Wherever it seems like you are saving on all three you do so by sacrificing control and flexibility.

If you know, 100% in your heart that you are never, ever going to want to grow your web presence, change it to suit your changing needs, try something completely new, start selling products or so on, then don't hesitate to go with one of the first two options (blog publishing, online website building). For example, Weebly makes it easy to build a basic site and will take care of the bulk of the site's administrative features.

Oh, I nearly forgot. There are some shady businesses out there too. In general:

Don't go with the cheapest, just because they are the cheapest. Often that service will try make money in others ways that exploit your work or worse, tarnish your reputation.

Paid development is pretty straight forward. You pay a lot of money and they build you a site (hopefully). Personally, I would shy away from having a complete site built from scratch as this is a waste of money. 90% of what you will need is already freely available. You should only use paid development for the remaining 10% that is beyond your experience or technical abilities.

This leads me neatly to the final point...

If you want control over your own Internet destiny, you have to go with open source software. It may be a steep learning curve at first, but knowing that you can do what you want, when you want and how you want is pure gold.

Most big projects like Drupal have huge communities of talented developers creating their code - these are seriously world class web sites, used by NASA, the british government, the white house and so on. They are genuinely free - no dodgy ad schemes involved. There are plenty of quality, professional development services associated with them too (if you don't feel like working on creating a site yourself).

Projects like Site prebuilder are based on open source projects (in this case, Drupal) and can further reduce the amount of work and learning required by provided prebuilt distributions that are already set up to operate as a store, social network, media, blog, forum or whatever.

I hope that has helped to put things in perspective. It's a lot to take in if you're just getting started, but knowing what you want now and understanding what you'll need in the future can help you make a choice...