As a hobby web-admin, I have used countless CMS applications. I began my endeavor as an amateur admin way back in 2003 where I shared the administrator responsibilities, of a fledgling adult social network known as “ExplicitZone.com”, with the site’s owner. That site started off running on the paid forum software IPBoard and eventually migrated to vBulletin. Three years and quite a few trial and error lessons later, the site shut down due to increases in hosting costs and the sad fact that most of our members migrated to FaceBook.
It was only a few short years later that I decided to register my first domain in 2009 and I begin experimenting with different CMS applications in my free time. I downloaded and installed software such as Ghost Blog and WordPress Blog software as well as found free forum software such as MyBB and phpBB. I learned as much as I could about all of the free CMS software that was available and it was during this time that I also began teaching myself HTML and CSS so that I could further customize my website.
As far as the above mentioned CMS applications, I found phpBB to be the best forum platform because of its ease of customization and the ability to access and modify the core HTML/CSS code directly from the control panel. Similarly, Ghost Blog was more intuitive, in my opinion, than WordPress also allowing deeper and more robust customization. But, truth be told, if you learn how to administrate one then you should easily be able to move from one to another. I have only briefly worked with the more general site builders that were offered by my webhost. I found them to be too “cookie cutter” for my taste and each time I tried to build a site using one… I would ultimately revert to some combination of either using one of the CMS applications, writing the code from scratch or both.
Both the site builders and the CMS applications I have used in the past incorporated a simple and easy to use “drag and drop” interface that made the actual design of a site easy for the beginner, but in my opinion, only the CMS software allows easy to customize functionality for the more advanced web designer.