It didn't take long to settle on a platform for my personal sites and client work. WordPress made sense. I'd picked it apart back in school, when everyone wanted the newest page builder and there was a new one every semester — but with all the options since, the answer kept coming back to the same three things: control, cost, customization.
I've built on most of the popular platforms — Squarespace, Wix, a few others — and each brings real strengths: seamless commerce, slick templates, increasingly good design tooling. They make building a site fast. But underneath, you're always working inside someone else's boundaries. There's a Squarespace look you can't fully tune out, and styling quirks you can't reach past. The cost adds up fast, too, once you want more than the basics.
WordPress gave me the opposite: drag-and-drop when I wanted it, the actual code when I didn't. Less flashy than the all-in-one builders, maybe, but if I'm trusting a platform with my brand — or a client's — I want to own it, not rent it.
That instinct — own it, don't rent it — is the same one that eventually took this site off WordPress entirely and put it here instead: hand-built, plate by plate, no template underneath it at all. Different tool. Same principle.