Should I use Web designer or Wordpress for my site?

[slast]

H Acorn, thanks for the reply it's good to have expertise like yours so quickly available!
Taking your issues list:
[*]Xara has no word search mechanism - clearly this is an important aspect for PicMA to be of use (?q=search/..)
Yes word search is very important so that's a major point.

[*]Your current Forum link fails - Xara has no Forum capability.
Lack of a forum is not crtical as I said to Ray above, but would be nice to have.

[*]Xara has no User Management for usernames & passwords.
User management - again and referring to your point about anonymity: I deliberately would not allow anonymous users, my FAQ item about it says "Anonymous forums (such as PPRuNe) provide wide access and often excellent discussion, but are also open to abuse, mischief-making and time-wasters.
The intention of the PicMA site is to promote serious discussion only. All users need to be assured that everyone has some qualification to particpate in discussions." This subject has had exactly that problem on PPrune ("Professional Pilots Rumour Network") which is probably the largest pilot discussion forum. There's been deliberate misinfomation posted and I want any discussion to be honest which requires identification.

[*]PicMA is using an Adaptive presentation - Xara is Responsive.
OK, I will look into that - just had to look up what the difference is!

[*]It is unclear what you need in the way of "forms" - I have taken
this to be the structured data at the bottom of several articles.
Yes, see above reply to Ray

The main lack of PicMA seems to be one of Citation. I personally would expect to see the source material lodged in some global aviation repository that was publicly accessible.
You are quite right: unfortunately, PiCMA.info is my attempt to create the global repository for much of this stuff, as there isn't one anywhere else! Skybrary doesn't have much of it as far as I am aware.
As far as the background documents are concerned one objective in setting the site up was that I realised I had a huge amount of paper documentation from the 60s on, from working on this stuff. Some of it was used then for pilot training. But as those of us who were involved retired and commercial pressure has meant that much training is now very curtailed, most pilots are simply unaware of a lot of background. There is a real danger that the knowledge was simply going to become lost. So I have spent a lot of time either scanning my own paper copies or researching and trying to find digital archive versions and bringing them to one accessible place!
For the accident reports, I try to only include events where I can access an official report, and make a copy available (may be copyright issues here but I'll take the risk).

I tried a web search for 'site:http://www.picma.info/ attitude' and got all of one Hit.
Your current Drupal search returns 16 Hits.
The lack of Hits in the first is down to your site being a CMS and the pages are not directly available.
In Xara, I would use an HTML table approach with Datatables.js with columns for your structured data and other columns for Title, Keywords, Citation, Full Description.
This would be best as a standalone page, still part of your site for advanced, detailed searches.
Plainer on-page searches could be met by Keyword & Title wildcard selection of a drop-down form.

OK, thank you - may have to come back to you regarding that !!

You have around 150 articles. I would publish these as separate sub-sites. They don't have to be Xara ones as they are very basic. a simple HTML template would afford a continuing Adaptive approach.
I might consider them as a MarkDown design instead. Cleaner for searches as well. Sorry, don't understand "markdown design" ??

You will have as many challenges with WordPress but it comes with User Management and Searches and your articles fit into Posts very well.
Less overhead but more prone to hackers.

Acorn[/QUOTE]
Thank you!
Steve

[Acorn]

MarkDown

Acorn