At one point in every business’s life, comes the moment when building a website and you hit a brick wall. It could be because you lack the skill, you want to make sure that everything is all right and fear that you might be too immersed in the business to regard it objectively or simply because you have a brain freeze and choose to externalize the service. Let’s take a look at various website builders and how they work, but first, a couple of general facts about them:
The Basics…
A website builder should never force you to learn code. It needs to be user friendly with an intuitive and easy to use interface that can be understood by any type of user. If a website builder does not have this, then you might as well turn to the next.
The next step is to make sure you have enough budgets to be able to purchase and maintain your site. The purchasable parts are the domain, images that might appear there that need to be bought with user rights and various plug-ins or themes that you might want to add. This is the main cost. Then you can add the hosting and maintenance per year which varies on type and volume of content.
Ensure that the builder has all the capabilities that tailor your needs such as social media integration and that supporting platforms can be easily linked to your page. Restrictions to volume of text or text boxes should not exist so be careful to check thoroughly from the very beginning everything that the builder has to offer.
The last step is to verify the details that you might need (like customer support or reviews) and then get started. Let’s see what your best options are:
WIX
A lot of websites have rating charts for website builders, but WIX comes up first for every one of them. With a rating of 4.8 out of 5 or 9.8 out of 10, WIX comes out as the most reliable, user-friendly website builder out there. The downside is that you need to make a custom e-mail address and unlike builders like Squarespace or Weebly it won’t allow you to have multiple editors, making editing possible only from a single account and slowing you down.
On the bright side, the platform is really easy to use offering a great flexibility when it comes to themes and design. It offers the possibility to edit on Mobile and a free plan that gives great options when it comes to SEO and e-commerce. That is definitely a plus the instant you begin your marketing and promotional strategy. WIX also integrates social media commenting system offering a tinge of familiarity to users who approach your comments section needing only to be logged with Facebook on the respective device.
Weebly and Squarespace
The second place seems to be a tie between the two. Weebly has a great responsiveness meaning that it guarantees optimization across mobile devices, properly scaling the website content to the capabilities of the device. WIX however powers more websites hence the great feedback it has in SEO from users. Squarespace allows you to schedule published posts making for better future planning offering the option of connecting automatically to your social media accounts to post the blog post on your behalf, doing half the job for you.
Weebly however offers more flexibility and allows you to choose between different commenting systems. The platform also allows you to undo changes, but only if you don’t exit the editor page. Once you do, any hope of returning to the previous look of work is gone. Here’s where WIX gains extra points since you can save as many versions as you want of your website, so if after one week you notice that the new interface has some things you want modified, you can easily restore the whole thing at any time. Squarespace also allows you to restore content that’s even 30 days old since it’s been deleted.
Now, another advantage of Weebly is the fact that if you have the app, you can even edit offline, allowing you to build your website at any time regardless of the quality or the existence of an internet connection.
WIX and Weebly have one more thing in common and that is the fact that they both offer the option of free newsletter services if you are one of the users that makes their website through their platforms. However, if you are an avid writer, you should know that Squarespace improves your search engine and blog indexing by integrating Google Author Rank into your profile also supporting guest postings.
Themes can be hard to tackle sometimes since they usually come up with glitches especially when you want to heavily customize them. Squarespace however, has very responsive and well made themes that we can say are the best amongst the rest of its website building competitors. WIX compensates by having a large number of themes to choose from, but in the end you need to decide what’s important to you.
And number three…
When it comes to your website, quality should be your main concern and the top three platforms that offer just that are here above and maybe could be matched by GoDaddy that seems to get better polished by passing month, ranking higher in consumer’s preferences, but it still has a long way to go.
So take a commitment and start putting an image to that great idea that you’ve been having for your business by uploading the first image above that lorem ipsum. Begin with a banner and end with more and more page views and positive reviews. Who knows? Maybe you will end up needing another web page soon!
