Web Design made Easy with these Builders (My Top Picks)

Are you looking forward to taking your business to the world? well after reading this, choose to save yourself some few bucks. Over the years, website building or designing or development has evolved. From the more complex nature of using codes, CSS, JQuery, HTML, etc. to nowadays drag and drop templates. it was kind of like using advanced command lines to design a website and it was pretty much difficult especially to the novice or someone who is just not into programming. Before common popular tools available for website building was Dreamweaver which was pretty much complex, WordPress which is still one of the most popularly used today because of its easy drag and drop features enabled people with little knowledge to build their own website. Today almost every SAAS company running website services is able to provide templates that are a basic drag and drop with easy customization. You don't need to start a website from scratch, All you need to do is, Once signed up with the platform or web builder, pick a template of your choice and customize. Some of these companies provide these templates for free and you only need to pay for hosting and a domain if you don't own one. Hosting is like renting a space on their server for your website activities. They provide all the necessities for a flexible website depending on the type of website or business services you intend to run. it could be a blog site, business or e-commerce, etc. 

Now if you have thought of owning a website, I will share with you my top picks for platforms or companies you may or should consider choosing from. Having had a glimpse of all four, I  will share with you my take on them and after reading, feel free to ask questions in the comment to know which to start from. They all have their pros and cons. I have taken into consideration their designs as in templates, flexibility, support tools they provide, customer support and response, etc. 

WORDPRESS:

Wordpress is by far the most popular Open Source Content Management System(CMS) used by approximately 75million websites. Wordpress is free to install, deploy and upgrade. Thousands of plugins and templates power a flexible and simple interface which reduces development cost and deployment time. The downside is not all templates are free. some are premium, which means you have to buy them separately from other fees. Apparently, Wordpress as a software is free to download and use. However, Wordpress beginner users can get a free domain name and 60% off web hosting from Bluehost which an officially recommended Wordpress hosting provider. With this discount, it means you can start a website for as low as 2.75 dollars a month. It's the same with Hostgator to which I prefer personally to an extent because of their customer support, 2.5x supercharged load times and security most especially. In my subsequent post, I will share with you my top picks or recommendations of web hosting providers.

Wordpress provides sophisticated themes for blogs, business, and e-commerce and it provides domains and self-hosted solutions as well as Enterprise VIP which has an unparalleled scale, security flexibility, and performance. 36% of the web is built on Wordpress. It also features Plugins and Google apps. In terms of pricing, there are four price plans for you to choose from, you can compare these price plans with the rest of the web providers I will list below. Each plan comes with a free domain for one year and you can as well transfer a domain you own from another domain registrar or host to Wordpress and you can also map a domain to your site on Wordpress without necessarily transferring the domain. domain transfers usually take longer period but mapping is easy and fast. all the domain credentials including billing remain with the initial provider.

If this is ideal for you, head to Wordpress and learn more. You can as well install Wordpress by downloading it directly from wordpress.com or via QuickInstall from the cPanel of Hostgator or other officially recommended hosting sites of Wordpress such as Bluehost.

WIX:

Wix.com Ltd. is an Israeli software company, providing cloud-based web development services. It allows users to create HTML5 websites and mobile sites through the use of online drag and drop tools. Wix is three years younger than Wordpress and somewhat similar in certain areas such as the provision of templates and website category be it blog, business or e-commerce. I have been using six for a long time for most of my web projects and according to my experience they are so good at providing tools that can boost your website and SEO, As a matter of fact Wix has its own SEO settings and it been made very easy in a step by step guidelines and at all times you get alerts or tips and how to improve the search engine ranking using their SEO. When it comes to pricing, Wix website plans are slightly more expensive than Wordpress while business/eCommerce is equal or less expensive. Moreover, depending on which you choose, you benefit from a free logo and premium apps that you can add to the site and boost your business.

Other advantages of using Wix is that you get free marketing tools such as video maker where you can make your own video ads and download in high quality for free, Wix also provides social media post templates where you can simply edit to make it suite your taste or the message of the day. With Wix, you stand a great chance of reaching a wide majority of clients with no extra cost using their email marketing strategy which by default every subscriber is being provided with 5000 email shootouts per month. you can upgrade to a higher number if you want. 

For the most part of it, unlike Wordpress, All Wix website templates are free. Upon signup, just pick one and customize it to look like you. It's so simple that you can build a website in a minute just using their question and response strategy. Comparing it to WordPress, WordPress is far superior to Wix as a web publishing platform for any kind of website. While Wix offers an easy to use website builder, you can accomplish a lot more with WordPress over the long run. but then the benefit of using Wix especially with Newsletter Marketing and Search Engine ranking is very impressive. you get a lot of free and premium apps to support your business even in terms of monetization to your blog. The Wix mobile app lets you control your website even from your phone. I easily managed all products on my store, monitor and chat with visitors on my site from my phone as well as post blogs. it was pretty handy.

You can use Wix for free for as long as you want but you can only fully enjoy their benefits only when you subscribe to a premium plan and Good enough, you can get your money back within a 14-day trial but I can assure you the process is very slow which leads me to comment on their another downside which is customer support, its very slow and sometimes you get a response two days after submitting a ticket. Like others, they also support domain transfers. Premium plans also come with a free domain for one year and when you are just getting started with Wix, you get a lot of discount promos which can enable you to get a premium for half the actual price. more on pricing, Wix provides two distinct pricing category which are website and business/e-commerce.

For website plans. learn more

If Wix is your ideal platform, visit wix.com to learn more

WEEBLY:

The same age as Wix, Weebly was founded in 2006 and they are pretty much alike. While Wix offers a bigger range of features and more designs, Weebly is a better choice for larger sites. Both Wix and Weebly offer a free plan as well as eCommerce and a blog. Weebly is user-friendly and intuitive. It's powerful enough to let you build a great-looking site without knowing any HTML at all. Unlike its rival website builder Wix, Weebly has a built-in code editor that lets you customize your site more extensively. Weebly's free online website creator uses a simple widget-based site builder that operates in the web browser. All the site elements are drag and drop and it automatically generates a mobile version of each website. Storage is unlimited, but the service restricts individual file sizes. Consumers are given the option to have any URL ending in .weebly.com, .com, .net, .org, .co, .info, or .us. (example.weebly.com)

Android and iPhone apps are available that allow users to monitor their website traffic statistics, update blog posts and respond to comments, and add or update products if the user has an e-commerce online store. Basic features for blogging and Ecommerce are supported: as of 2018, site owners could develop simple stores with payments through either Paypal, Stripe or Authorize.net. Users can choose to incorporate advertisements in their pages, and visitor statistics can be tracked through an in-house tracking tool or Google Analytics. Weebly also has integrated newsletter marketing features.

As of 2020, Weebly was offered in 15 languages: English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese, Polish, Norwegian, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Chinese, Japanese, Russian and Turkish

Like Wix, Weebly is free but does have a paid feature where once you sign up for its Pro plan, you are granted access to more interesting website builder tools. But fear not, the good part is you don't actually need the paid version of Weebly to build awesome websites. The free version of Weebly is more than enough to get the job done. And for the record, just like its rivals, you can attach a domain you already own. For example, If you already own a domain name, you can use it with your Weebly site via one of the following options: You can point your domain's A Records to Weebly's IP address, which means you'll be able to publish your site to your domain name while continuing to manage and renew the domain through the current company. Terribly enough, Weebly is not accessible in every country and I will coin them a little unstable and worst still, they are very bad at SEO, that's a no-go area. if from your country you are able to access weebly.com, good for you. Build a website then. I will recommend them for eCommerce purposes. Weebly eCommerce is a solid choice for building a functional online store - its reasonable prices and a good range of features means you get amazing value for your money with its eCommerce plans fairly good and cheaper.

GoDaddy:

Like its name implies, Its actually the "Daddy" of the above mention website building platforms. Go Daddy was actually founded in 1997, Its definitely 23years old the time I am writing this post. GoDaddy is both a domain registrar AND a website hosting company — and they have the tools to help you build your website. This means you can register your domain name, build a website for it, and get it on the web - all in one place. Now unlike the others, GoDaddy very limited or no templates for you to choose from. Once you sign up with Go Daddy, you are presented with options to choose the kind of website you want which could either be a business, blog or eCommerce. when you choose your category, what is presented next is a dialogue box for you to input your website's name. Once done, it provides you with a template you can easily customize. Sadly enough, it provides only little customizing effects or tools to add to your website. The best about GoDaddy is pricing, its pricing is exceedingly cheaper than all the above mentions especially for eCommerce. the downside is it has limited tools to support your website such as apps, social media tools which are limited except for e-commerce plans. Once you sign up for a premium plan, you benefit from 24/7 support, business email address for one year, One-year free domain and at least 100 email marketing shootouts which is still less compared to the previously mentioned. GoDaddy site is free but only for a limited time until you get a premium plan. Below are premium prices for GoDaddy.

But overall, GoDaddy is good for one who is not familiar or doesn't want too many customizations but just wants a website or on a tight budget and wants to try e-commerce plans with fully supported features, then GoDaddy is the ideal platform. reasons why it made it to this list. of all the platforms, GoDaddy according to my experience is the simplest to customize but it does not provide flexible designing or stylish features and animations. It's straight and direct but mobile-friendly.

So this rounds up my top picks for web design newbies, Entrepreneurs or freelancers who want to build/develop websites. If you have decided to get your business to the world, any of this awaits you. write to me in the comments or contact me privately if you need any further related details. These platforms support both business and eCommerce. In subsequent times, I will present my picks for solely eCommerce and Hosting companies. If this was informative. Please share and don't forget to subscribe for subsequent posts