Learn How to Make a Website Quickly and Easily with our Highly Acclaimed Website Builder. Our easy to use Web Design software will let you Create a Website in no time at all! 33 Hosted Website Builder Services Easily create a professional or personal website with your own domain name. Apps & Services Featured Free New All Categories Blog Business Developer Ecommerce Email Forum. When it comes to building websites, understanding what is a good website builder software (or platform) and how to pick one for you will help you move forward in creating your own website. Here’s Wikipedia’s definition: Website builders are tools that allow the construction of websites without. Choose a website builder: 17 top tools By Joseph O Web design Want to build a website without needing to write any code? We select the best website builders to bring your vision to life. Create a website yourself to your image. Splendid templates and fully customizable or start from a blank project. Web editing software complete and robust. You can create a website to your design in a simple few clicks. Website Builders and how to choose the right one for your needs. Website builders — Word. Press, Squarespace, Wix, and dozens of others — are popping up everywhere. Some of them claim they’ll let you build a site within minutes. Others claim they provide all the power of Photoshop plus native code combined. Ultimately, these tools all attempt to achieve the same goals: To help you build professional websites with dramatically less time and hassle than coding sites by hand entails. To empower designers who aren’t code- savvy to design, develop, and host a standalone website without having to rely on developers for assistance. Instead of being a deep- dive into these tools, we focus on answering the most pressing question: Which sitebuilder is best suited for you and your web development goals? Whether you’re a budding novice or a professional designer, there is indeed a perfect website builder for you. If you’ve always been curious about these tools, but could never tell if they were worth the time investment, read on. Who are you? As someone looking to build a website, you fall into one of four categories: A developer who’s comfortable with code, but not necessarily design. You’re looking to leverage an advanced site builder that can improve the look of your design work while not hindering your ability to fully modify HTML and CSS. A designer with a great eye and a dislike for mucking about with code. You prefer to work as visually as possible. You want a professional design tool that lets you accomplish everything visually while not taking away the pixel- perfect precision you expect from Photoshop and Sketch. A designer- developer hybrid with an intermediate or advanced skill level who’s equally talented with both aspects of website development. You’re capable of crafting a beautiful UI and implementing it with high quality, semantic code. Your interest in sitebuilders is one of time and cost effectiveness; you know there’s a quicker way to develop client sites, and you want to get up to date on the latest and greatest tools. A non- technical business person who’s not familiar with the intricacies of web design and development. You want something introductory that will walk you through the process of creating a professional website. Have you figured out which you are? Let’s pair you up with the perfect website builder. Squarespace is best for the non- technical, Word. Press is best for developers who don’t design, and Webflow is best for professional designers. If you’re not sure which category you fall into, Webflow is the safest bet. It flexibly addresses all four user types, and it provides an impressive amount of power. Let’s find out why. Squarespace: Best for the non- technical. Squarespace is one of the most widely- used website builders. Its focus is on providing a simple means to set up a beautiful, responsive site within minutes — without having to be a professional designer or developer. It works as follows: You’re provided with a selection of twenty or so templates. You choose one then you customize it through a sophisticated — but limited — toolset. The toolset’s inability to fully overhaul the look of a template has the benefit of ensuring that you can’t break the functionality or responsiveness of the template. The downside to this is that — since Squarespace gets roughly a thousand new users per day — every base template is chosen an average of 5. Squarespace sites look suspiciously similar. This lack of uniqueness is what makes Squarespace unsuitable for professional designers who are looking to make to- spec, one- off sites for clients. Further, because Squarespace locks sites within its platform, Squarespace is also unsuitable for developers looking to customize a template with extended functionality. However, if you’re looking to build a full- fledged, beautiful website for yourself or your small business, Squarespace is the best solution. It’s beautiful, it’s simple, and it specifically empowers the non- technical. Squarespace’s pricing model is very accommodating: Sign up and build your site for free. Once you’re ready to publish, select from one of three pricing plans that range from $8 to $2. USD per month. Hosting is included. Honorary mention. Similar to Squarespace, Wix is a tool for the non- technical who are comfortable relying on structured templates. It boasts a sleek drag and drop editor that allows you to easily customize your template of choice. In contrast to Squarespace, Wix offers hundreds of themes to start from. Unfortunately, many do not look professional, and Wix’s overall user experience isn’t on par with Squarespace’s. Wix’s basic plan is free, but for advanced options — such as an ecommerce template or additional bandwidth — you’ll be looking at up to $2. USD per month. Word. Press: (Still the) best for developers. Word. Press is the king of blog- oriented content management systems. It’s as old as the hills, and just as unshakeable. It’s by far the most popular website builder on the web — due in part to it being completely free. An enormous community has grown around Word. Press, resulting in an unparalleled volume and quality of both add- ons and support. From SEO optimization tools to feature- rich ecommerce systems, the Word. Press plugin ecosystem has everything you need to create a website of any type. However, integrating Word. Press add- ons, modifying templates, and setting up hosting is not for the non- technical. Due to the piecemeal nature of the Word. Press ecosystem, you’re expected to connect a lot of the technical dots yourself. In other words, Word. Press is made first and foremost for developers. If you do have the technical skills to work with Word. Press, building custom themes is unfortunately rather painful: In addition to needing an intimate knowledge of HTML, CSS, and Word. Press itself, you’ll be spending hours separating your themes into their constituent parts so that they work within Word. Press’ rigid structure. Professional designers who want flexibility in their design choices will find this workflow hostile. Nonetheless, Word. Press remains the best site builder for developers since it puts them in charge while not restricting their programmatic ability. In addition, the technical issues a developer will inevitably encounter with Word. Press have certainly already been encountered before, meaning that there’s a trove of support questions to wade through when you need assistance or general website development advice. The power of the Word. Press community cannot be understated. Ultimately, if you’re a developer who prioritizes getting a feature- rich site up quickly, Word. Press is for you. If, however, you’re a designer working with clients who expect unique sites built to spec, you’ll need to look elsewhere. Note that there are two hosting options for Word. Press: Either host your site on a Word. Press- specific hosting provider, such as Word. Press. com or WPEngine. Word. Press software on your own server. If you choose the latter, be aware of the security issues that CMS self- hosting entails: Because Word. Press is so popular, it’s a target for hackers, and new vulnerabilities are constantly being exposed — not just in the core software itself, but also its third- party plugins. If you go this route, ensure you read up on security. Honorary mention. Craft isn’t a site design tool per se. You won’t find the comforts — and distractions — of a drag and drop UI here. Instead, Craft is a streamlined tool for developers who aren’t afraid of getting their hands dirty setting up a custom content management system within the confines of an existing UI. In short, Craft is powerful CMS that makes a clear distinction between developer and user. As a developer, you get fine- grained control over data. As a client, you get segregated access to modifying that data in a way that isn’t overwhelming and doesn’t conflict with the developer’s implementation. Craft is essentially the content side of Word. Press without the design- crippling restrictions of Word. Press’ template system. The technical nature of Craft, and the expectation that you have an existing design to feed into, makes it ill- suited to non- technical individuals looking to create sites for themselves or for small businesses. But for developers looking for a powerful reduction of the CMS aspect of Word. Press, Craft is seriously worth looking at. While free for restricted personal use, Craft jumps into the hundreds of dollars for anything beyond a simple site. Webflow: Best for professional designers. Webflow offers all of the power of Word. Press with none of the cost or frustration that relying on a developer for assistance entails. It’s technically more in- depth than Squarespace, yet still designed with the non- technical user in mind. Also unlike Squarespace, Webflow provides control over every component in an interface. You’re not bound to the look of a pre- existing a template. Webflow is the website builder best suited for agency and freelance designers who are creating custom websites for clients: In addition to allowing you to start designing from a responsive template, Webflow also allows you to design from scratch. Hence, you can build out sites to clients’ exact specifications. As with Squarespace, once you’re done designing in Webflow, you can push your site live with a single click. Or, as with Word. Press, you can also export your site and host it elsewhere. This mobility — the opposite of platform lock- in — provides the best of both worlds: You can either quickly publish a website without worrying about hosting, or you can export the site to send it to a developer for extended customization. This is what makes Webflow duly fit for both designers and developers: Developers can leverage Webflow’s powerful design customization features to help them create professional designs that they can then export for use as a base template in their development workflow.
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