Giles Turnbull evaluates three free web creation tools in a BBC article. Turnbull includes Conversant, which powers this web site. Basically Turnbull says Conversant is powerful, but complex.
Conversant sites, like Manila sites, are potentially very powerful, but there is some learning to be done, even for experienced web users… the process of creating the site of your dreams might be time-consuming.
Once you have got the hang of using Conversant, you will be able to do some really clever things with your website. Create new templates for whizzy designs, automatically send email to regular readers when new items are posted, even manage a collection of digital photos, or any other files.
How complex is Conversant? From my experience, Conversant is about as complex as desktop web authoring tools such as Dreamweaver. I am far from a Dreamweaver expert and many parts of the program overwhelm me (i.e. I have no clue what certain features are supposed to accomplish). I can use Dreamweaver well enough, however, to create and update a web site with thousands of pages.
The complexity of Conversant is comparable to the sort of complexity found in an application such as Dreamweaver. If all you want is a basic weblog, end of story, then Conversant might be overkill. On the other hand it is perfect for small to medium to large websites where a) applications such as Dreamweaver really start to break down as far as effectively managing a site structure, and b) every other product out there is either much more expensive and even more complex.
I’ve got about 4,000 web pages on several different domains and receive about 2.4 million page views a year — relatively small potatoes but not bad for just one person in his spare time. For me, although there was a bit of learning curve, Conversant is actually far less complicated than the alternatives and delivers a lot of features that frankly I haven’t seen in other content management systems.