Go Forth: Build Your Web Site or Blog

I often assign projects in my courses at Marist College that require students to create a website or blog. Students have a wide range of options to choose from when selecting a platform to host these social media sites.


It’s nice to have a variety of options to consider, but deciding on which one to choose can be confusing. 

For instance, I am currently teaching COMG 503 Media Relations, one of the courses in the M.A. in Communication program offered by pur School of Communication and the Arts. Student teams in the course must complete a final project that consists of a communication plan and digital portfolio (e.g., “media kit”) for a mass media campaign to support a “client” organization’s strategic goals and initiatives.

Digital News Rooms & Team Portfolio Sites

Each student will construct a digital news room to display his or her individual work; and each student team will construct a digital portfolio site to display team members’ collective work, or digital media kit. There are many ways to produce a blog or website. To help students narrow their choices, I suggest that they consider using either Blogger, WordPress, or Weebly. Each site has its own pros and cons, which I will address here.

Weebly, Blogger, and WordPress are all free and easy to use, even for novices; yet they are powerful enough to support most intermediate and even some advanced online communication projects.

• Weebly offers a variety of user friendly, intuitive, drag-and-drop tools for creating sites that look more like Web pages than blogs; but authors have to pay for more advanced tools. 
• Blogger offers a wide variety of pre-made templates, themes, colors and gadgets that allow users to create professional-looking and very interactive blogs. 
• WordPress also offers templates, themes, colors and other tools; and it offers options to customize the site for use as a blog, a Web site, and even a digital portfolio.

Sub-domains & Domains

Weebly (ad supported), Blogger, and WordPress all offer free hosting on sub-domains of the weebly.com, blogspot.com, or wordpress.com domains. A sub-domain is a subset of a larger domain. For instance, Marist has its own domain: marist.edu. It also has sub-domains like iLearn, its online teaching and learning platform (ilearn.marist.edu), and Notes, its e-mail system (notes.marist.edu).

Marist students and faculty also have an option to set up their own sub-domain and “drop box” in the marist.edu domain, where you can store files, host a blog and website, etc. The Marist HELP Desk provides information and support for these kinds of academic technology services.

To illustrate the concepts of sub-domain and domain, let’s say you publish a blog on Blogger (blogspot.com) called “Red Fox Tales” and you use something like redfoxtales in your Web address, or Universal Resource Locator (URL). Your Blogger site would now have a sub-domain name of redfoxtales and a domain name of redfoxtales.blogspot.com (preceded by http://www or https://www).

Academic vs. Professional Sites

For my academic assignments, students are welcome to use either Weebly, Blogger, or WordPress to build and host  host their site on one of the respective company domains. However, authors who seek to build a site that reflects a less commercial, more professional, and personalized brand -- not associated with someone else’s domain -- should consider paying for their own domain-hosting service. There are numerous secure domain hosts and most are affordable even on a small budget. 

For example, the ubiquitous Go Daddy hosting service (famous for its television ads) advertises that it can provide a domain name for less than $1.00 and Web hosting services for less than $3.00 per month. This Mashable article provides an excellent definition of sub-domains, domains, and Web hosting services for WordPress. Here’s another Mashable article that reviews Web hosting alternatives to Go Daddy.

Not to complicate your decision about Web services and hosting, but don’t limit your considerations to just Weebly, Blogger, or WordPress. There are other fine site builders out there. For example, consider Google Sites, another free Web site builder that offers free hosting on its sites.google.com domain. 

OK, go forth and build!