You may be great at running a business and have a positive outlook for the future, but most of us are less proficient at promoting ourselves, particularly when it comes to skills such as web site building. The options open to you as a business are to hire a professional site developer for a bespoke product or use one of the many off-the-shelf, online website builders that are now available. Many are already included in your website hosting package but there are many decent stand alone options such as Weebly, Wix etc.
The great thing about the growth of the sharing economy, is that these kinds of tools are appearing online all the time and are essentially designed to make design easy. They use set templates and can allow you to develop a great looking site in no time at all with little or no programming knowledge.
And if you don’t know the difference between your H1 and H2 headings, there’s no need to worry. Website builders work on the basis of getting the visuals right; most of the time all you need to be able to do is insert text and drag and drop boxes.
Ease of Use and Speed
The first thing you should look at is how easy a particular website builder is to use. In truth, most online sites are designed to be highly user friendly. Often, all you need to do is choose your template, arrange your boxes of text and select your images. For a blogging site this is a fairly simple process but if you are running an ecommerce business you are going to want to take a deeper look at how your chosen website builder works, find those value added extras, test it out and pick the one that really works for you.
Another important thing to look at is whether you can easily use your website builder on different devices such as laptops, tablets and even smartphones, giving you flexibility when updating your site. The other issue is speed. On poorer performing devices, some of the website builders online nowadays work a little too slowly and it can be infuriating having to wait for pages to update.
Cost
How much you are going to pay is also an issue. For many website builders, if you are not also going for a hosting platform and a dedicated URL, then you can often get pages for free. If you are a business and want all the bells and whistles that go with an ecommerce site, there is going to be a monthly or annual charge. That means you’ll have to pay to use a particular URL (unless you have one purchased already) and select the package that works for you. Most sites have a novice, intermediate and professional package available and cost can vary from a few pounds a month to several hundred. Going for a well-known name such as Wix or Go Daddy can be a good idea but you should also shop around from some smaller providers who pack just as much punch.
Plenty of Help and Advice
If you are not a millennial with digital technology firmly ingrained in your bones, then a web site builder that delivers plenty of online help and advice should you need it is another relevant aspect to consider. Many site builders will have FAQ sections and forums for more advice, as well as video tutorials, but look to see if they have telephone or live help lines as well.
Mobile Readiness
Finally, all web site builders should produce sites that are mobile ready – which means your site can be seen and easily used clearly on a mobile phone. According to statistics, more of us than ever are accessing the online world via our mobile devices. Make sure your website builder actually provides this facility automatically or whether you have to download an add-on such as a plugin.