Building a Website with an IDE and Hosting AND/OR just using a CMS to build online

In order to set up a new website online, and add the content, images, etc. to make it beautiful and attractive to visitors there are 2 main options.

1. Create the web pages using an IDE.
2. Set up a CMS (Content Management System), login to the website CMS and then create your site using templates and the tools provided by the specific CMS you chose.

IDE and Hosting

I usually use Microsoft Code as my editor for a website. It has superb expand and collapse options around the HTML code and also supports PHP analysis and editing. Instantly test your work locally, and when you have achieved the features you want, and the style and functionality you want, just upload it to your host and test on your live site.

Set up a CMS on your host, and build your site online

The other way to set up a site that doesn’t need a lot of custom PHP and is mainly static content, is to just set up a CMS (Content Management System). The most popular CMS in use today is WordPress, with some other options like Joomla, Shopify, and Wix, rounding out the top 4 in use today. Here is a complete list of CMS from wikipedia, for the curious (Caution, this list is long, and broken up by language and purpose).

So, for this website, we used Softaculous from out host (Host Papa) and then built all the content on this site using the admin back-end on this website.

This is a much easier way to build a website, and you can even include some features of Bulletin Board web-pages using plugins to a WordPress site.

Conclusion

All in all, either way of building your own site has it’s advantages and disadvantages. Both are valid ways of building online web sites, but most websites these days use some form of CMS, and a lot of them use WordPress. All in all it’s just bits and bytes flowing through the internet tubes.