Reviewing the Mobirise website building application with a comparison to Markdown
When designing a digital humanities project, it is important to determine what methods and tools are best for your project and for yourself and your team. After experimenting with both Mobirise and Markdown, I have found that while Mobirise is easy to use and provides a polished look, it limits the user to specific templates, a large portion of which are behind a paywall. Conversely, Markdown is free and provides much more freedom to the developer, but can require more learning and skill to achieve the same look that Mobirise provides.
Mobirise is extremely easy to use; its features have been streamlined and are easy to find. When I was experimenting with the application, I found it easy to find "blocks" catered to different features I might want on my website, including pictures, videos, articles, and site menus. Furthermore, it was easy to arrange these blocks in the order I wanted them to appear on the web page, edit text and images, and even the length and width of the blocks to help achieve the look I wanted for the page. However, many of the block templates were behind a paywall, so if your project has little funding it may be best to look into other alternatives, apply for special funding, or seek out a discount. Furthermore, the nature of Mobirise as an application that provides block templates to help users build a website leads to limitations. For instance, I wanted to create an "About Me" page that would be titled "About Me" in the heading, have a subheading with my name, then have two columns of text, with one column interrupted by an image of myself, so that the left column would be all text with my name above it, and the top half of the right column would be an image while the bottom half was text. However, I could not find any template that fit my desire to mix image and text in a single block and I was unable to find a way to create custom blocks–unless perhaps I had used some sort of extension. Furthermore, I could not find a way to assign alternate text to links as I could for images, which is a concern for anyone interested in web accessibility features.
In contrast, Markdown offers much more flexibility since it is completely free and you are building a website from scratch rather than from templates. However, since it is a language of its own, it requires more learning to achieve the same type of look that you can get on Mobirise in just a few clicks.
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