UPDATING: June 21, 2019: I’m still using WPEngine to host most of my website. Why? Well, they bought StudioPress, so WPEngine customers get the Genesis themes for free. Also, they offer SSL certificates included in the price, and their customer service, for the most part, is okay.
I also still use Dragon Naturally Speaking speech-to-text software to dictate my blog posts. Finding a Nuance Dragon Professional Coupon Code that works is rare, so I’ve published a list of sale links here.
Here’s the original post from Mar 2018:
School has been busy.
Setting up a website is easy… and yet hard at the same time. Sure, there are lots of teachers who like Google Sites, but personally, I just can’t get over some clunky experiences that I’ve had with them.
Don’t get me wrong. I like Google, and I’m a big fan of Google Docs in the classroom. Our students are used to Google Docs, so having Google Sites within that classroom management system works.
Plus, Google has come out with “new” google sites as opposed to “classic” google sites. There are some differences listed here, but I’m still not sold.
(Back in the day, you couldn’t have students leave comments on your class google site, without them being an “editor” and having the ability to edit the webpage itself. No thanks.)
So, I use WordPress.
I like how you can customize and run your own code if you rent out server space. Over the years, I’ve been through a few different companies.
For the past few years, I’ve been with SiteGround. Some nice features, but when I tried to have 25 students log into our class website (using buddypress), the website just crawled.
Now, I’m trying WPEngine. That’s significantly more cash for a class website, but on the other hand, it seems to work better with a class set of students logging in at the same time.
Today, I migrated this classroom technology site over to WPEngine. We’ll see how things go.