Many people that want to start their first website get intimidated by all of the options available and not knowing where to start. People are tempted by companies like GoDaddy or Wix that offer website templates that anybody can create. Although this maybe true, it might not be the best way forward. If you are not going to use these do it yourself (DIY) solutions then you'll be wanting to consider a Content Management System (CMS) and the options are both numerous and the number of choices increases every year with new systems being developed. We'll skip all the DIY website builders out there and focus just on CMS. Within all the CMS possibilities we'll focus on just 2: Ghost and Wordpress. We wrote an article called Ghost CMS vs Wordpress that talks about a lot of the comparisons but this post will discuss why we recommend Ghost over Wordpress.
For people with limited or no experience with coding or basic html, Wordpress is probably a better option as once you get working with it, you have more flexibility in editing your site for features like your menu for example. Ghost is meant to be a light blogging platform for posts and pages (posts are like pages, just date stamped). Editing a Ghost template file requires some basic understanding of coding so if you have someone that is good with websites with some programming experience, you might want to ask for their help if you need to edit a Ghost template.
Ghost is faster
Ghost is new and was created by a former deputy lead of Wordpress and created Ghost as he felt Wordpress was too bulky and cluttered. Ghost is far less code than Wordpress which is part of what makes it faster.
Wordpress is less secure
Wordpress does have a few more opportunities for hackers than a simple system like Ghost but doesn't mean Ghost is that much more secure or that Wordpress is all that bad. The bottom line is that Wordpress is the #1 website and blogging software so it's naturally the biggest target of hackers
Ghost has less features
Having less features is both a good thing and bad thing. If you want to make your website complex, database driven and have more features and widgets, then Wordpress is the way to go. But when your site just needs to be a site that is maybe just a few pages explaining your business or a blog, then you don't need the extra bells and whistles. On Wordpress, everytime you add a new plugin (feature), you slow your website down and you add extra opportunities of having your website exposed to hackers.
Sometimes a website should be stripped down to the basics so you can write, add links, images and just keep it simple. Many ghost websites and templates are easy on the eyes because new designers are working with Ghost.
Markdown vs WYSIWYG editor
Markdown is the name of an editor and this forum uses Markdown and it's very easy to use and difficult to mess up your content which does happen easily enough on Wordpress's WYSIWYG editor (that's What You See Is What You Get).
Here is what writing this article looks like in Markdown
List of popular CMS
- Wordpress
- Ghost
- Joomla
- Droopal
List of new CMS
