You can hire a programmer or a company to build a decent-looking website of your own (if you are big on the wallet). Or you can do it yourself if you are enthusiastic enough to do so. Getting your own website used to be a huge hassle. Thankfully, online site builders have simplified the task. There’s an abundance of website-building tools and services available on the market. Here below, we present to you 10 of the best website builders to help you easily build your own website.
1. WordPress
It sure demands you invest a little time learning your ways around it but it offers you a level of customization like no other. Although questions are raised sometimes about its security, you can rest assured to find fixes and answers to any of your questions, given the fact that it has a big, robust community of users and developers. Nonetheless, WordPress excels when it comes to ready-made themes, mobile-optimized templates, and widgets that allow you to include everything from comments to images. There are even tools which can help you find what WordPress theme is used by a site you particularly like.
2. Weebly
Weebly has been on the market long enough to be one of the favorites among those who use template-based website builders. The drag and drop features offer WYSIWYG solutions to neatly build websites from novice to advanced designers. The customization options are limited to inserting elements into designated areas of your page, but there are plenty of options to help you choose the template of your liking. One of its outstanding features is that it allows you to download your entire website as a ZIP file in case you want to move it to a standard web-hosting service. It also packs a set of e-commerce tools if you are looking to put up an online store.
3. GoDaddy
GoDaddy is known mostly for its inexpensive domain registration and site hosting. It also sells online website builder accounts which are easy to use, stylish, and minimalistic. This could be just the thing for those who don’t have much talent in designing and want to quickly build a good looking website. The tools are to-the-point, intuitive and easy to use with drag and drop interface. The storage and bandwidth offers are generous, but they do not offer mobile-site creation and do not have the blogging and ecommerce tools. While it has no freemium package, the premium packages get the top-notch customer support.
4. Wix
Wix is recognized for its simplicity offered without compromising possibilities. It is a free website builder in the market which powers over 70 million websites. Your website will be hosted with their subdomain, if you opt for the free account while the paid accounts offer you more, including a customized URL. There are thousands of extremely user-friendly HTML templates with powerful, intuitive interface, plus mobile site-building tools (although the sites aren’t strictly responsive). Blogging tools are available for the bloggers and also e-commerce tools to put up a storefront. It provides a wide array of third-party services and a flexible customization service that allows you to separately customize an accompanying mobile site
5. Shopify
Shopify is the all-in-one ecommerce solution which is currently powering over 200,000 online shops. It’s been praised by thousands of its users and the reviewers as the best online shop builder currently available in the market. With 24/7-available, top-performing support system, Shopify has all sorts of tools to meet the extended functionalities of your online store. It gives you over 100 professional-looking, premium templates to choose from with mobile e-commerce abilities. Everything related to the e-commerce portion is taken care of by Shopify so you can focus on other aspects of your business. It is truly a one-stop ecommerce solution.
6. SquareSpace
SquareSpace stands out from the crowd of website builders because of its responsive, visually stimulating templates. There’s not much you have to worry about the mobile site creation since everything is mobile-ready. It automatically generates a mobile site from the site you built for desktop browsers. It gives you extensive styling options to customize your website design easily without having to edit codes. However, it gives competent designers choices to insert their own HTML, CSS and JavaScript codes. Although it doesn’t offer free accounts, the paid accounts are not very expensive and you get 24/7 customer support. It also supports ecommerce site building like Wix and Weebly.
7. Jimdo
Jimdo is another WYSIWYG website builder with lots of site customization options and good mobile support with reasonable prices. The freemium package, JimdoFree, provides you enough tools to build a functional website with not so steep learning curve. It is actually e-commerce oriented, so it has above average ecommerce features, but that does not restrict you to build a good website other than an online shop such as an Instagram search engine. It has a large community with multiple language support and features for social integration. It even launched the first iPad app for site building—the first of its kind.
8. BigCommerce
BigCommerce gives you a comprehensive set of e-commerce tools that you actually use to build your online shop. The biggest plus point that BigCommerce offers is that it allows you to build a fully integrated and synchronized store on various social channels to help you grow your sales. The templates are mobile friendly and professional looking while the BigCommerce apps let you extend functionalities as your business grows. It is the next big contender among the online store builders after Shopify.
9. IM Creator
IM Creator is the one you want if you prefer to have a quick launch without having to spend much time designing and preparing your website. It comes with pre-populated templates with sample contents which you can quickly replace with your own content and publish. The templates are image rich and professional looking with a pure drag-and-drop editor. The websites are all mobile ready and the customer support responds you within 12 hours, which isn’t bad given the fact that they manage 3 million websites.
10. LightCMS
LightCMS gives you roughly 100 different pre-made templates to choose from while offering a basic set of CMS tools as well as a rich set of ecommerce tools. This lightweight builder allows you to directly add and edit contents while browsing your page instead of featuring a central dashboard editor. The templates are responsive, but don’t really let you customize the mobile experience, although the desktop sites offer options for the advance users to design the website with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Site-traffic monitoring and optimization for search engines are made easy with a set of SEO and analytical tools. Featured photo credit: Blogger Tolly Moseley Portrait by Marisa Vasquez via Flickr via flickr.com
