If you’re thinking about building the first website for your business—or considering switching your site to another platform—you probably have a lot of questions. How hard will it be to build and maintain my new site? What are the strengths of each platform? Do I need to be a programmer to build my site? How much will it cost? What platform is best for my industry? What types of marketing does it support?
To help you decide which website builder is best able to take your business to the next level, here are the top 4:
1. Wix: User-Friendly, Customizable—And No Coding Required
Wix offers a wide choice of templates—you can either choose from among 500 existing templates or customize your own. You also get drag-and- drop functionality for many design features, including galleries, video, text and vector art. Wix also offers advanced SEO tools and integrated marketing solutions (including free email marketing) to push more traffic to your new site.
One of Wix’s strong selling points is its versatility. That’s especially important, in order to customize the site to align with the needs of your industry. You can create a site that works for restaurants, online stores and more. And perhaps most important for newbie site designers, the Wix editor is code-free (you don’t need to know programming to use it, in other words).
Finally, Wix is affordable. It offers several payment options. You can choose their unlimited package for $14 a month, Pro at $19 or VIP for $29.
2. WordPress: The Most Popular—And Still One of the Best
WordPress currently powers more than 30% of all websites on the internet—that’s an impressive track record, and with good reason. For one thing, WordPress uses an intuitive editor that simplifies things like adding images, as well as embedding audio, video and documents into your website. It also includes advanced SEO and analytics features to increase the online visibility of your site.
WordPress’s vast library of custom themes makes it possible to create a large number of attractive designs, and to do so with no knowledge of coding. In addition, there is an enormous choice of plugins to enhance your site’s functionality. Among the more popular are those for contact forms, analytics, SEO, email marketing, conversion rate optimization and site security.
WordPress offers several pricing options. You can start with “Personal” at $5 a month or choose Premium for $8. Your best bet is probably Business, which will cost you $25 a month. For online stores, you can choose ecommerce, currently at $45 a month.
3. Weebly: Intuitive and Affordable
Weebly offers outstanding user-friendly design features which require no coding knowledge to install. Their drag-and-drop editor is easy to use for everything from images to video backgrounds and animation effects, like reveal and parallax. Or you can add advanced customization features using your own HTML/CSS & JavaScript.
Weebly also provides some powerful marketing tools, including those to enhance email marketing, blogging, content sharing on social media, SEO and site analytics. If you choose the ecommerce solution, Weebly will help you create Facebook ads right on their platform. They also offer a strong database function to store, manage and organize your contacts. Finally, Weebly hosts client sites on its servers free of charge—and it offers SSL security and DDoS protection, not to mention 24/7 support via email and chat.
You can start using Weebly for free. Their paid options will run you from $5 to $38 a month.
4. Squarespace: Award-Winning Templates and Powerful Integrations
Squarespace features among the most aesthetically pleasing templates (all crafted by their in-house web designers) on the market, enabling you to create a site that will turn heads. Its marketing capabilities are second to none: you can integrate a wide range of marketing strategies, from email marketing to social media, analytics, lead generation and nurturing, SEO and content marketing/blogging. Squarespace also lets you add a map of your store location, an online store builder and calendars.
Equally important, Squarespace offers an array of integrations to enhance marketing and design. You can add Google Maps, PayPal, Google AMP, Getty Images, Open Table, and Disqus, among many others.
You can get all these features at a reasonable price. The Business Website option will cost you just $18 a month. The Basic Online Store option is a bit more at $26 a month, and the Advanced Online Store at $40 a month.
Those are some pretty sweet options to build a website that will help you achieve your top marketing objectives—and help your business grow—without a knowledge of programming, and for not much money. Of course, it might seem at this point like too many choices, and you might need some guidance choosing the platform that will work best for your industry, and your business. If you still have questions or concerns, contact me or my digital marketing agency Go Getter Marketing Group for a consultation.
