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If we can to create a Website we have to decide on a CMS provider.

My favored options are currently Wordpress and Squarespace.

Criteria:

• Easy to use
• Many Plugins/Costumizable
• Easy to maintain
• Low cost (If possible)
• Good Seo integration
• Fast learning curve.
• Big Community
• Affordable experts to help implement it (e.g. on Upwork or Fiverr)
• Overall cost to get and deploy website

Added by David

• Breadth of Features ( Native Functionality Vs. Third Party Plugins ) - 3rd party plugins are not as reliable as support may end for them and they are more prone to hackers
• Security
• Scaleable, and able to handle large volumes of data (for the future)
• Have an integration with Discourse

Other Provider

• Wixx (I heard Websites are not good)
• Webflow ( I heard it's rather hard to use)

Research (more technical and longer)

WordPress is the most used CMS, has the biggest community and most plugins and themes so I'd say that's what we should use as I don't see any limitations on it.

Most big companies either use a CMS that is scaleable for apps (also called enterprise CMS), like Wordpress or Drupal or they rely on their provider to choose or customize a CMS for them. That said, we can also use a normal CMS platform that is good in terms of scaleability.

There are a lot of opinions on which is the best CMS or Website builder, any every article has a different ranking for them.

Using a website builder may look like a better option because of how easily and rapidly it can be built, but you are giving up some flexibility. For more advanced features and customization options. Especially since we would want to integrate the website with our forum or with Excel files, etc.

Costs of building a WordPress website:

• Domain - on average, domains cost $2-20 /year.
• Hosting - $15-100 /year
• Security - SSL certificate ($10-200/year), Premium Security plugin ($30-100/year), Firewall ($150-1000/year)
• Maintenence - probably $1000/year, but not less than $100.
• Other one time costs like plugins, Themes, as can be seen here.

Types of Wordpress hosting:

• Shared Wordpress Hosting - cheap but low performance and can have downtimes because you share the same server with others. Not suited for big websites (more than 5 pages) or websites with high traffic.
• Dedicated Wordpress Hosting - Maintenance is challenging because you are responsible for the upkeep of the server. Either need to manage things yourself or hire a professional to monitor resources, deploy updates, install security patches, protect against hackers, etc.
• VPS Wordpress Hosting - mix of the two (document more here)
• Cloud Wordpress Hosting -
• Managed Wordpress Hosting - it's the improved version of shared hosting.

We need to outsource a freelancer to deal with our site maintenance, according to link. Depending on services, probably around $1000 per year for small security updates, bug fixes, backups, etc. Not updating it can lead to broken links, security risks, etc.

Conclusion (more straight-forward research)

There exist 3 ways of building a website: 1. Using an Website Builder (e.g. Wix) . 2. Using a CMS (e.g. Wordpress) 3. Build everything from scratch (using HTML and CSS)

Pros of using a CMS (will take the case of WordPress) (Most data is taken from here)

• 100% Ownership and Control - access to code and database
• Wide variation of Plugins (e.g. Contact Form) and Themes ( like templates in Website Builders)
• Custom Content and Dynamic Content. Full customization features.
• As scaleable as you need them to be, because of the number of plugins. Not limited by having to follow templates offered by the Website Builder.
• Good ways of improving SEO
• Offers flexibility
• Easy to migrate

Pros and Cons of using a Website Builder:

• No Coding and Designing skills needed
• Not good for SEO
• Various limitations and restricted features. Templates cannot be fully customized.
• Not the best for mobiles. Not good for large businesses.

Name	Consider?	Elimination reason	Ease of use	Ease of learning	Pricing	Team strength	Additional functionalities (e.g. Ease of migrating CMS)
WordPress	Yes		X	X	X (free, or $4 to $45/month) Enterprise starts at $25k/year.	X	Starting with Pro plan( $15/month) you don't have ads, you can download plugins and have more control over your site.
Wix			X	X	~ ($10-149/month)
SquareSpace			X	X	~ ($11-36/month)
Drupal			--	--	~ (it's free but you will need extra modules and plugins, which cost money)
Joomla			~	~	~ (can create website for free and self-host or host on their sub-domain) Upgrading to their private hosting is also possible.
Webflow
Weebly
Framer
HubSpot					~ (free with basic features, but there are plans at $23 and $360/month) e.g : drag and drop editor are only available starting with $23/month paid plan.
dotCMS					~ (free with basic features if you host it yourself, $3750/month for their full package)
Contentful					~ (free with community support, $300/month for paid plan with tehnical support.
Ghost					~ ($9-200/month with 500-10,000 members)
Grav
CraftCMS					X (free for https://craftcms.com/pricing
Sitefinity
Umbraco					~ (from $36/month, hosting included) If you want their support it starts at $9600/year, otherwise you can use their app for a fee, only with community support.
TextPattern					X (free)
Blogger					X (free to use, you get a free BlogSpot domain name. If you want to add your own domain name, you will have to purchase that separately and link it to your account.)
Bitrix24
TYP03					One-time payment of $5000 with 1 year of updates.
PrestaShop					Starting at $20/year, going up depending on needs.
Concrete5
Appy Pie					$18-36/month
SiteCore
GoDaddy					$10-21/month
Salesforce
Magnolia					To retain full control over your data, infrastructure, and upgrades by deploying Magnolia on your own terms it starts at $3000/month (self-hosted). Open-source is free.
Optimizely	No	At least $36,000 pear year, being focused on enterprises.
Kentico	No	Too expensive			-- (self hosting starts at $990/month, and hosting in their cloud starts at $1990/month)
Shopify	No	Only used for eCommerce - online store.			~ ($32-399/month)
BigCommerce	No	Only used for eCommerce - online store.			~ ($29-300/month)
Agility	No	Too expensive			-- ($1249/month - one website, for small teams)
Oracle WebCenter Content	No	Pricing is only suitable for enterprise. They only have 200 clients.			-- (starting price $3450
WooCommerce	No	Only used for eCommerce - online store.			X (as low as $135/year)

WordPress

Wordpress.com is pretty much wordpress.org + domain & hosting, but wordpress.com is not recommended because of its limitations : can't monetize with ads; can't upload plugins or customizable theme; you have to use their domain name

Divi is the most popular Wordpress theme for businesses and a page builder that can be easily used by beginners.

Pros

-no coding

- 41% of all websites on the internet use WordPress.org

- great flexibility : online store, auction site, blog

- thousands of free Wordpress themes

- over 58,000 free plugins (work like apps )- the most that any CMS offers

- very SEO friendly

- supportive community - 75k members on Facebook group

- cheap hosting

Cons

- you have to manage security and backups yourself, but can be made easy using a good hosting provider they are keeping backups of your website. You can also install security plugins.

Joomla

Pros

- flexibility

Cons

- complex

Drupal

Pros

- offers great flexibility

Easy to add content if you know what you're doing, but it's not beginner friendly

Cons

- 1% of all websites are using it

- devs that you would hire would cost a lot more than Wordpress devs

- mainly used for complicated sites

Wix

Pros

- has a limited free plan

- beginner friendly

Cons

- for free version you have 1. Wix branded domain 2.They show ads on your site

- once you choose a template you can't change to a different one, unless you rebuild the whole website. On WordPress you can change the theme and be left with most of the content the way it was

- not too easy to migrate data from Wix

- only 1.5% of all websites