Aspiring entrepreneurs are often visionaries who focus on storytelling, information presentation and concepts, but lack technical skills and experience to bring their ideas to life. Indeed, turning a great idea into a successful company requires a great deal of detail work, and one of the most important part of this work is creating a website. Once you have decided on a company name and have your branding established, you can start building a website.
This is where online website builders come into play. These handy web services have come a long way and firmly entrenched in the web publishing market, and with good reason. They’re fast, require no programming knowledge, and offer a ton of readymade (yet highly customizable) solutions for all tastes. In other words, they liberate business owners from many headaches associated with website creation, such as design revisions and time-consuming correspondence. Site builders allow you to abstract from technology and focus on your craft, without sacrificing the quality of the end product.
Below are some of the most popular website builders used to set up professional-looking, multi functional websites.
#1 MotoCMS
MotoCMS is a template-based site builder for creating beautiful, effects-rich Flash and HTML websites. Its key advantages over the other site builders are as follows:
- More than 2,000(!) ready-to-use templates categorized by industry and type (Flash/HTML).
- Drag-and-drop, WYSIWYG editing. No coding required.
- Inbuilt mobile view editor.
- Handy ready-to-use widgets.
- Mobility (you can host your MotoCMS site anywhere on the web, as opposed to most sitebuilders that work only on their own servers).
Cost: you pay once for the chosen template ($139) and then pay your hosting bills only. In case you opt for BlueHost, you can get a discount (they partner with MotoCMS).
#2 Squarespace
Squarespace is a robust web publishing platform with a focus on design. It’s an excellent solution for those who plan to start a blog or eCommerce website. It’s literally loaded with business-specific features that will help you strengthen your brand on the web. All Squarespace templates are mobile-ready from the start.
Cost: there are three paid plans and free 14-day trial. All annual plans include a free domain name of your choosing.
#3 Weebly
Weebly is probably one of the easiest website builders. It’s an all-in-one web service that can help you put up your own website in one sitting. Similar to Squarespace, it has its own feature-rich eCommerce platform.
Weebly is very flexible in terms of design – you can either use a ready template, upload a third-party theme (developed specially for Weebly) or rebuild a default theme from the ground up using their inbuilt HTML/CSS editor).
Weebly was one of the first to develop native Android and iOS apps to let users create and edit their site’s content from any place, on any device.
Online website builders work for different business types. Their templates are easy to mold to your specific needs and require no coding at all, unless you choose to use the advanced editor. All the three site makers described in this post offer either free plans or trials, so you risk nothing when creating a test account with one of them.
Malcolm Thomas mostly spends his time testing and comparing Do-It-Yourself website builders. Find more reviews on his personal website http://mmthomasblog.com/.
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