Create A Free Website

WordPress does not support [insert feature you need here]!!

On one of the popular Forums frequented by CAFW members we noticed an awful lot of WP cheerleaders (WP makes me ZERO DOLLARS but everyone here says its the best so I do too). Which got us to thinking about both the "peer pressure phenomena" and the ability of these cheerleaders and their regurgitative forum post to mask other solutions that may in fact outperform WP in key areas and therefore represent a huge value to new Webmasters.

The basics of this observation seemed to be that the cheerleaders do the promotion for WP and so new people looking for solutions get forced into using WP by the others (much to their detriment as our recent product shoot-out confirmed).

This constant and blind cheer-leading by those who themselves were bullied into using WP has led to massive WP sales and massive failure by millions of would be Webmasters to create and maintain a useful presence on the web. We used to use WP too, now we dont.

On top of that, the forum cheerleaders do not seem to notice or mind that a few of the more senior/savvy cheerleaders simply feed off of the less knowledgeable, by selling them WP sites, and themes for sites at obscene rip-off rates and/or e-books on how to "make money online" with WP powered websites. These more "savvy" forum inhabitants (Moderators in some of the more obvious cases) simply scrape together and edit third-party information without testing it or proving it in nearly ALL cases. The predatory WordPress cheerleaders then have a real reason to continue touting WP as the end all solution to any online problem; furthermore "buy my e-book and make millions". There was even one shockingly obvious scammer (who somehow was a Moderator in the very forum he was preying on ???!!!????), pretending to be an expert on both the Internet and all manner of associated technology in addition to how to make money online, who literally said "it is impossible that anyone could make a better program than wordpress" and he even went so far as to REMOVE a posting from a supporter of a different product.

HELLO! - These people are simply using the other cheerleaders to make a little extra money because they have not been able to do it using WP or the contents of their get rich scam e-book. So if you are a blind WP cheerleader, we advise you NOT to buy anything from anyone concerning how to benefit from WP, since allegedly you can find a way to use it for free and all the modules you want should also be free etc.

Which brings up the actual usefulness of WordPress as an application and platform with which to build a website. It does this WELL if you can find the modules you need,but it does not support ANY features not directly related to Blogging natively. For additional functionality you WILL have to find free modules that allow WP to do what you want or PAY for modules that offer the needed capability. The reason WordPress LOST the recent product shootout was because of this fact. It is only a BLOGGING TOOL not a CMS or WDA engine.

What that means is that there are in FACT, many other alternative tools to build complete websites that do not require that you go and find module after module to make them work. We obviously prefer this service but have also in the past used WordPress for Blogging (which is what it is designed to allow you to do). There are others like Joomla and Drupal too.

The bottom line to this post is simple, use your own brain to make your own choices, find a product or service you can use with the features you need and watch out for forum predators (especially if they are Moderators) who simply want to sell you their useless e-books that have ZERO value, or there incredibly useless "guaranteed" WP themes, because although they may have been scraped, repackaged and edited with finesse, they have never been used by the WP cheerleaders selling them to generate one thin dime.

Every once in a while we like to pit all the top FREE WEBSITE generator services together to see which one is the best. We don't just regurgitate what the commercials say, we actually test them and see which is the real value. Which, led us to create this free website here in the first place.

This years DIY FREE Website Comparison Shoot-Out was no different. We put the advertising heavy-weights up against MySafeMedia.com and they flat out LOST EVERY CONTEST. So we posted a chart on the front page so everyone who wishes to know the truth could see.

Nicole, John and Abner all made free websites on the powerhouse services (the ones that would let them anyway) to learn the interfaces. Next they tried to make a website like this one using all available means from each provider. Being that this is primarily a textual site, we figured that the competition would be fair.

The first challenge was using the interfaces, which we did not evaluate as part of the comparison because there is too much opinion involved but props to MySafeMedia.com and VistaPrint, as the popular opinions were that they were the easiest.

Once we got done learning, the first test was to replicate this website using whatever methods we could and see how long it took. The goal was to do it in 5 mins! Now while that may sound ambitious, it only takes a few minutes to make a website if you have all the content to cut and paste.

So we began the comparo by visiting VistaPrint which is a huge powerhouse service with more than 13 million users. Our findings were that the service was fairly easy to use and the UI was solid. In direct comparison to MSM (MySafeMedia) there was some missing multimedia capability and NO social features.

Next we visited Wix, which is the current Flash based juggernaut. Wix lets you build beautiful and animated sites but there is not much actual functionality available beyond that. The UI was also complicated and slow. In direct comparison to MSM, Wix is better for those who have a love for flash but fairly useless for those looking to SEO a website or who want features like a BLOG or custom contact forms with data storage. Wix also produced painfully slow websites that frustrate visitors and search spiders.

After that, it was Microsoft's turn. We visited Intuit Websites and were able to make a site using the fairly typical UI. As with the others, this service lacks capability when compared with MSM but since it is powered by Microsoft the advertising does it's job and that is why the service is so very popular.

Finally, it was time to take WordPress for a spin. Our observations of the incredibly popular service was that it is NOT a tool to build a website at all, it is just a blogging tool. It does not compare to MSM but does have equal capability to the BLOG feature included with MSM websites. To be fair you must know that we actually used to host this site with a standalone WP install on our dedicated server and we did use many modules to achieve this same functionality as you get with MSM, but it took 11 modules and 11 installs to do that, and cost at the time $312 USD.

Replicating This site -  times to completion are below:

MySafeMedia	VistaPrint	Intuit	Wix	Wordpress
240 seconds	FAIL	FAIL	EPIC FAIL	FAIL

Ok, after all 4 competitors failed, we decided that maybe we should stick to simple text and image based task instead, as none of the other services allowed true multimedia during the trial period or even if you paid. WordPress was the only service where you could come close due to the themes and widgets available, but you would still have to spend a lot of money to get all needed functionality and need to purchase hosting to install it.

Example#1: WordPress FAIL - The *FREE online service cost $60 per year to include Video and another $30 to get rid of those annoying Advertisements on your Blog. Sorry WP, you have great templates and millions of users but, you're no longer a huge value. Times are changing it seems.

Example #2: Wix EPIC FAIL - This service produces an incredibly SLOW Flash site that is not search engine optimization friendly. Next!

Example #3: Vistaprint - Not FREE as it turns out.

Example #4: Intuit Websites - Not FREE and in fact is very expensive.

Next was test number two, which was to setup a Social Website that allowed members to join and comment, rate and follow conversations using automatic notifications. Again, WordPress was the only service where some modules could be found that allow at least partial functionality. The rest were an EPIC FAIL.

At this point we decided that the major advertised services were simply popular because of the advertising as NONE of them provided any value in comparison with MySafeMedia for most people. Sorry but they just don't.

So after using the entire day to see what those services DID allow you to do we posted the results in the following table:

Features	VistaPrint	Wordpress	Intuit	Wix	MySafeMedia
Actual FREE Websites - No Ads	No	No	No	No	Yes
Premium Features - $1.99 per month	No	No	No	No	Yes
Upload Video, Music & Pictures	No	No	No	No	Yes
Instant Site Template Swapping	No	No	No	No	Yes
Members Can Join Your Site	No	No	No	No	Yes
5 Privacy Levels	No	No	No	No	Yes
Email Blast Your Members	No	No	No	No	Yes
Individual Member Profiles	No	No	No	No	Yes
Social Networking Capability	No	No	No	No	Yes
Members Can Follow Conversations	No	No	No	No	Yes
Classifieds Section	No	No	No	No	Yes
Automatic Notifications	No	No	No	No	Yes
Public Announcements	No	No	No	No	Yes
Comments & Ratings	No	No	No	No	Yes
Automatic Slideshows	No	No	No	No	Yes
Instant Video Chat	No	No	No	No	Yes
Custom Contact Forms	No	No	No	No	Yes
We could go on but why bother? Those other sites are no where near the value of using MySafeMedia.com

So, after much time testing, we came up with the same end result as last year. Kids, it's another K.O.  for MySafeMedia and another win for the people who have found out about the service. The only complaint continues to be the lack of templates to choose from, but since the site is owned by an entrepreneur, its actually his call to offer more templates of widgets, so maybe they will in the future (hint, hint).

-CAFW Team

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