Wix, WordPress or a dedicated site?

Osgood, Ben_M, Nancy, Ben Pleysier...

Thanks for the responses...

1. Osgood: From what you say, WP sounds like a good option. Ok... will check it out.

2. Ben_M: You've kind of spelled out why i was thinking of at least the domain being directly owned. Your second para hits on more or less why one was thinking of an established blogsite rather than attempting it all on my own.

3. Nancy: I know where you're coming from but, if you read my op, you'll realise your questions are irrelevant in this case. They just want to post his writing for friends and family to be able to access them. Facebook is not suitable  - as is obvious - for something like this.

4.BenP: Thanks for the link. Checked it but seems to be more for app development.

Again, thanks to all...

Cheers...

Have a look at https://bubble.io/

What do you envision for this site in 5, 10 or 15 years? 

Who is your site's target audience?

Why not just use Facebook for now and see how it goes?

To answer your first questions, buying your own domain is independant of the hosting situation. Personally speaking Wix might try to sell you this, but if you ever want to leave it's easier to just purchase this through a registrar and update the DNS yourself to point somewhere else.

If you don't have a lot of experience managing websites or working with CMS platforms, Wix may be simpler to get it up and running for this purpose. There's other competitors too in the space, Squarespace/Weebly/etc., that you may want to check out as well while you are investigating to find the best editor you prefer.  While you are tied into their environments with their editors, there is less maintainence and overhead then managing it youself. They also have support that you wouldn't get with a self-hosted Wordpress option (unless you are considering Wordpress.com hosted).  

Sounds like Wordpress may be the best option for you, although obviously understanding and learning the Wordpress User Interface will take some time but not as much time as trying to code your own website/content management system, if youre not extremely good with coding.

Wordpress is a 'stand-alone' Open Source (free to use) workflow which means it can be used on any php hosting provider once a domain name has been purchased. Many hosts these days have a 'quick-set-up' option for installing Wordpress. It also has a massive pre-built template eco system and many plugins, so I'm sure there is some suitable ready-made design that you can find to fit your needs.

Wordpress has one big draw back and that is it remains vulnerable to security attacks because of its popularity but I'm sure a small website wont be targeted, there  is nothing to gain for hackers. If you use Wordpress plugins they can then break the website if the plugin developer doesnt update the plugin when a new version of Wordpress is released. A lot of Wordpress plugin developers, who freely make their plugins available, have no financial incentive to update, so the plugin gets left in its original state, potentially unsupported in newer versions of Wordpress.

I dont know a lot about Wix apart from it makes websites. (You probably can only host a Wix built website on Wixs own servers, so you are effectively locked to their system)

Personally, because I know how to code, I would always build my own simple bespoke Content Mangement System. Some of these pre-built systems carry a lot of uneccessary overhead and have complex user intefaces, but it may be a case of needs must and better than nothing.