Long gone are the days when building your own website meant investing hours upon hours learning all the ins and outs of HTML and other web development languages.
Nor is your only viable alternative a simple ‘What You See is What You Get’ website editor which, whilst it certainly avoided the need for any coding language, created somewhat less than stellar results that just didn’t hold a candle to more professionally designed websites.
These days, there’s a far better option for creating professional standard websites quickly, easily, and without learning how to code.
Online website builders such as Wix, Weebly and Squarespace are designed to help those without any technical website knowledge create great looking websites in no time. Simply select your pre-designed template, customise it to create the look and feel you’re going for, then drag and drop your content into place. There’s just one little hard part to deal with first: choosing an online web builder that suits your needs.
To help you out, here’s a few things you might want to consider when deciding where to build your next website.
Number of pages you’ll need
Or to put it a better way, the kind of budget you have to spend if the number of pages offered by your site builder’s free package just doesn’t cut it.
Most free offers allow you to create just a few pages for your new site. This is no problem if you’re planning something fairly basic with just the key information about your business, hobby, or whatever the subject of your site might be.
If, on the other hand, you’re planning a more content rich website with lots of information and features, you may need to pay for an upgraded package.
Before you leap in then, it makes to decide exactly how many pages you’re going to need, then shop around to find a site builder that offers the best value for your needs.
Range and quality of templates
No matter which platform you use, you’ll find a number of well-designed templates that certainly hold their own when compared to those put together by expert designers, though how many you’ll have to choose from, and the quality of those templates, may vary from site to site.
With some site creators, you have unlimited access to an extensive range of templates, so you could potentially spend hours scouring through each one until you find a design that’s absolutely perfect for your site.
With others, you may find yourself a little more limited, and needing to invest in a premium package to get the best designs.
Again, this is why it’s so important to look at the different tools available.
Customer support
For a lot of people, customer service is way down on their list of priorities, though we would argue that it’s actually one of the most important things you’ll need to think about.
Though all the leading website builders make it easy as possible to create and launch a website, there may well be times that you find yourself struggling to use a certain tool, or when things just seem to go wrong for no real reason that you could figure out.
If there isn’t access to good customer support available, your site will, at best, go live without reaching the standards you were hoping for or, at worst, never see the light of day.
Some platforms make customer support a premium-level feature only, which obviously doesn’t help you out if everything else that you’ll need is contained within their free version.
Mobile optimisation
More people than ever are abandoning their laptops and PCs to visit their favourite websites through mobile phones or tablet devices.
To that end, its important that your website both looks good, and functions correctly, no matter how a visitor chooses to access it.
In most cases, you’ll find that mobile optimisation is a premium-only option for most site builders, though again, look around and find what works for you.
Admin
Marshal Hubs
Priyanka Srivastava
John Stephen