First, let's discuss why you even need a webpage in this day of social media domination of the web. On a personal level, you would not want to send prospective employers to your Facebook page, so a personal website makes more sense as an online, customized resume. Another reason worth consideration, for both personal and business sites, is that building your own site gives you endless design choices. You also get total control over products and services you may sell and how they are delivered.
Further, having a real, dedicated site makes a business seem more authoritative and trustworthy than a Facebook or Tumblr presence can on its own (though you should certainly also consider those services as elements of your online presence). It is as much an opening ante in the business world as having a business card for your company.
Getting your own website used to require a lot of tech wizardry, such as knowledge of servers, HTML, FTP, site registrars, and web hosting services. Thankfully, we now live in the age of easy online site builders. The services included here let you make a well-designed, mobile-friendly site with minimal technical knowledge. They can even take a small or sole-proprietor business to profitability with buy links, online stores, and other moneymaking options.
Larger businesses spend many thousands of dollars to get their custom-designed and programmed sites, but there is no need for smaller organizations and individuals to go to that kind of expense. For about $10 per month (or around $25 if you are selling products) and a few hours of your time, the services included here can help you create a unique, attractive website.
With all these services, you build everything yourself, using simple drag-and-drop interfaces. The services even let you include items such as social share buttons, photo galleries, blogs, and media players. Some even let you restrict viewing with a password and let you have people join up as members of your site.
Several of the services included here offer free options, too. If you choose that path, however, your site will include branding from the provider, which will necessarily make your site less impressive to savvy surfers-and shoppers. Free offerings vary greatly in the amount of storage and bandwidth they allow, so read the small print to find out how much you get with each provider. Weebly, Wix, and WordPress.com are among the most generous with their free offerings, if that is the way, you want to go.
Before you can start building your home on the web, you need an address for it. Most of the site builders here can register a unique domain for you, and all can give you a web address using the provider's domain, for example, yourname.sitebuilder.com. The services also let you use a domain you have acquired from a third-party registrar such as pairNIC, but you usually must pay the site builder for that privilege.
All of the web services listed here have you start by choosing from a selection of templates for your site. The better ones, such as Duda, Squarespace, Weebly, and Wix, use templates that automatically reformat your site for viewing on mobile devices. They also offer specifically targeted templates based on your site's purpose, such as for promoting a bakery's sales, getting gigs for a musician, or keeping wedding guests informed.
Once you have chosen a template for your site, you need to make it your own. Most site builders let you tweak the color scheme, fonts, and page layouts, as well as add new pages. A good site builder offers sub-templates for the most commonly used page types: About, Contact, Products, Galleries, FAQ, Blog, and so on.
Of course, you will also want to add custom content to those pages. You do this by adding text areas, photos (see Photos and Galleries section below), buttons, and other widgets. The better site builders, such as Wix and Duda, offer a marketplace of third-party widgets, for things like forms, chat, reservations, and social feeds.
Some site builders, such as Squarespace, Strikingly, Virb, and uKit, restrict you to placing page objects in spots that will not make your site look garish, which can be an advantage if design isn't your forte. Other builders offer more freedom; if that is what you are looking for, check out Wix.
Starting with Wix's ADI (artificial design intelligence) tool, several of the site builders now offer a tool that lets you enter social accounts and other personal or business info, and presto bingo, they get you a no-work website. Jimdo and Simvoly now offer similar if somewhat less ambitious tools. Wix's ADI even impressed a professional designer acquaintance of ours with results we saw in testing, mostly using images and information it scraped from her LinkedIn account.
Of course, if you want to go all out for sales, you need to move up to a dedicated web shopping cart service like Shopify$9.00 at Shopify, but that is a step you might not be ready to take. Most of the services here offer some ability to sell items from your site, if only in the form of a PayPal button, but some do not offer that in free accounts. More-advanced options found in some builders let you process credit card payments and add your own cart and checkout pages. The more-powerful site builders include product promotions, email marketing, and inventory and shipping tools. Some let you sell digital downloads, while others do not; see the table above to find out which do. Only a couple of these builders let you put ads on your site, though most of them allow some degree of custom HTML code insertion.
Moving to another Site BuilderOne downside of most of these services is that, should you someday want to move to another web host, you will likely be out of luck because of the custom code they use to display your site. Only a few services let you take your site to another web hosting service: The most complete example of this is Weebly, which lets you download the standard site server folders. Squarespace offers some transferability by letting you output your site in standard WordPress format. As you might expect, the same transferability holds for WordPress.com and WordPress.org.
Support among the services varies widely, from free WordPress.com account's only offering community support, to Jimdo's email-only service, to Wix's telephone-callback service-even free accounts! Many of the site builders offer rich online support knowledge bases and FAQs, so there is a good chance you will not even need to contact the company. I test each service's support as part of the review process by asking how to connect a domain bought elsewhere to my site and how to sell digital downloads.
Website Builders: Wix, Duda, Simvoly, Squarespace, GoDaddy, Strikingly, uCoz uKit, Weebly, Jimdo, WordPress.com
