If you’ve got a great product, the next step is getting it out there. You need a website. And there are a lot of popular options for creating a website for your business. You could use a DIY page builder or hire someone to tap into the wider publishing landscape. We’ll explore some popular options in this 10-minute read.
Ways to build your website
The decision to get help with your build or go it alone is a largely personal one defined by budgets and timelines. Here are the ways to build your website:
1. Agency – If all of these sound too hard or time-consuming to manage, you could hire a website design agency to create your website for you. They’ll use the most relevant platform for your product or service and manage every detail down to the last lazy load. However, for this service, you will pay a premium over DIY options. But the results will be a more customised, SEO streamlined and higher quality website than you could make yourself. They can also help you consider your future needs and build with those interdependencies and growth plans in mind. Lastly, they are always on hand to make updates and ensure your website performs well with the latest changes for SEO, as well as having the experience on how to protect the security of your website.
2. Freelancer – If you don’t quite have the budget for a web design firm but you do want some help with your website, a freelancer could work. Find one on popular gig economy websites or look on Google. You’ll save versus hiring an agency, but you will be taking on a bit of risk. Freelancers tend to work to their own schedule and you can never be 100% sure they are a good fit until they’ve started working on your project. However, an experienced freelancer will save you the time and hassle of building your website alone. And their ongoing support fees will be generally lower than an agency.
3. Site builder – If you have no budget for support, you can go DIY for your website design. Plenty of WYSIWYG editors exist that allow you to upload, type, drag and drop your way to a functional website using premade templates. These are usually free for a basic version with nearly no customisation. But they charge a small monthly fee for their more advanced features. The only downside here is that it will be challenging for a templated website to stand out from the pack – at least in comparison to your own code. And that you may need a full rebuild if you pick a builder that doesn’t meet your long-term needs.
CMS platforms for dev-supported builds
Here are the most popular CMS options for creating a website with your design team:
1. WordPress – Arguably the most popular website platform on the planet, WordPress benefits from endless functionality. It’s got a plugin for almost any kind of SaaS and it can be used to create any type of website there is. It’s perfect for content-rich sites and is best harnessed by people with at least some coding experience. This is the no-brainer choice for blogs, review websites and other content-heavy businesses.
2. Drupal – According to their website, “Drupal is the #1 platform for web content management among global enterprises, governments, higher education institutions, and NGOs. Flexible and highly scalable, Drupal publishes a single website or shares content in multiple languages across many devices.” That’s good for businesses that are content-rich and will need to grow across all buying channels quickly. This is a natural choice for larger businesses or ones with very complex libraries.
3. Joomla! – According to Theme Isle, “Traditionally, [Joomla!] is more geared towards developers who aren’t afraid to “get their hands dirty” working with servers.” But, you’ll get a slightly more secure website for that extra time investment. Not only because it’s not as popular of a target for hackers, but because of its option to force SSL and require 2FA. And Joomla! offers more customisation and native SEO options out of the box than WordPress.
Popular hybrid website design options
These hybrid solutions could be used by a single freelancer to create a site, or you can use them yourself. They include:
1. Web Flow – They bill themselves as a no-code platform for building great websites and that’s largely true. According to their website, Web Flow allows you to, “take control of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript in a completely visual canvas — and let Webflow translate your design into clean, semantic code that’s ready to publish to the web, or hand off to developers.” And it allows you to create designs using your real store products and content instead of dummy data.
2. WordPress (again) – It’s also pretty easy to make and manage a WordPress website yourself. You may need to familiarise yourself with popular plugins and configurations, but there is good documentation available for a solo freelancer or DIY builder to make use of. And WordPress benefits from its popularity. So it’s easy to find integrations for it and freelancers to help you improve it.
3. Divi Builder – Divi is a page builder and theme in one. It layers on top of WordPress to provide a distinct design experience & interface. (Elementor is its nearest competitor.) It’s got a very easy user experience and allows you to create granular layouts. This can help keep each page on your website from looking just like all the rest. However, it might be hard for a total novice to use (especially with all the shortcodes). So, you may want to have someone configure it for you and then show you how to manage that website going forward.
4. Shopify – You might choose Shopify if you want an eCommerce store up and running in minutes. It’s a very easy platform to work on and its primary function is to provide a seamless online retail experience. So, you’ll find most of the efficiencies are around managing your catalogue and quickly publishing changes to your website within the platform. It also has built-in support for popular payment providers, social media sites and more. Since it’s so heavily geared towards eCommerce, it’s not suitable for any other sort of business.
Popular page builders
These options are simple to use right out of the box for people with no web design experience. If you’re managing a website yourself, these are all solid choices:
1. Wix – This is a very popular platform for beginners. It has thousands of beautiful templates that you can customise for any sort of business. However, once you choose that template, you can’t change it in the future without starting from scratch. That makes the Wix drag and drop editor great for people without any coding experience who want a simple website that looks nice in a matter of minutes. But it’s not suitable if you need control over your uptime, hosting or other fine details.
2. Squarespace – Squarespace is a place for creatives. This website builder is known for some of the best templates in the marketplace. If you need a website with a strong visual impact, this is your best bet for out-of-the-box design. However, it’s a bit limited on the lower-cost plans and site speed for very complex templates can be slow at times. Choose this website builder if you’re an artist, designer or another creative professional on a limited budget with no coding experience.
3. Weebly – When Weebly was acquired by Square; a payments provider, it took on more of an eCommerce and payments focus. So, that makes it a really strong option for your store’s catalogue. It’s got an easy interface and loads of pretty templates to use. It’s also good value for money compared to some of the other options on this list. But it will take a bit more time to get set up because everything needs to be initially configured manually. There’s no AI to help get you started.
4. GoDaddy – Since GoDaddy is one of the largest domain registries in the world, it makes sense that a lot of people use their website builder. It’s just easy to use what’s there, right? Forbes rated it highly for their initiative builder interface and smart AI (lacking in Weebly) which can have you up and running in mere minutes. But their SEO wizard might fool you into thinking your website is optimised when it’s just configured for SEO. And lastly, some of the better customisation options are locked behind a paywall that’s higher than other page builders.
