Creating a website using a blogging tool: WordPress or Movable Type?

My corporate website is pretty minimalist, since I’m a one-person consulting shop and most of my good stuff is here on my blog. However, I’d like to redesign the site to be a bit more dynamic, and I’m thinking of using a blogging tool to do the entire site, although I intend to leave my blog here on ebizQ where I’m part of an integration community.

My site is hosted with Yahoo! small business services, which offers me WordPress or Movable Type preinstalled, and I’m looking for any advice on which makes a better website creation tool. Any comments?

I have a bit more experience with Movable Type since I ended up rewriting most of the templates when I moved my blog over to ebizQ; I’ve used WordPress for blogging but never had to change templates or any other administrative tasks. However, as an old coder, I don’t think that I’m going to have a problem learning enough about either one to do something interesting.

6 thoughts on “Creating a website using a blogging tool: WordPress or Movable Type?”

  1. Sandy –
    I’d lean toward WordPress..mostly for the reasons Prakash pointed out. Having built several sites with both platforms, the thing I really like is the extensibility of WP. There’s a good selection of plugins and the CSS and .PHP files are really pretty easy to modify with a little elbow grease. The biggest pains have been image uploading, ironically enough. At least that’s something Six Apart did well from day one. Also, depending on your ISP, WP (2.x)seems to perform a little better than MT, especially when posting new content. But again,(for now)the out-of-the-box tab-based navigation is really the biggest differentiator for those wanting to build a full-fledged website framework.

    Just my .02

  2. I’m a big fan of WordPress, which I just started using a couple months ago after using blogger with ftp publishing for a while. I haven’t tried MT, but my sense is that WordPress is more pleasant and more extensible.

    I was thrilled to find that with WP I could easily create pages that weren’t structured as blog posts.

    As for comments spam, the redmonk guys use MT I think and have had a terrible problem with spam. Akismet comes with WordPress 2 and it’s caught almost all the spam coming into my site.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.