Building a personal site in the blog format has many obvious advantages. It’s fast to build, easy to manage, flexible and expandible. If you are using open source content management systems (CMS) such as Wordpress (Blog) or PhpBB (Forum), there are big communities out there that generate enormous amount of resources that allow site owners to choose specific feature sets and implement them quick.

The build-from-scratch approach simply seems a lot less attractive now. If I have enough control over customization, there is almost no reason not to go with this time-saving route, even it means I have to live with a fixed content / presentation structure.

There was a time I thought building a Flash wrapper is more interesting than the actual content. This site could have looked like this: