• 10 Nov
    2017

How to Choose the Best Website Builder like WordPress & Wix?

You have started a new business, and you know for sure you need a website to tell the rest of the world what your company must offer. But now, there are so many website builders (tools used for constructing websites) available out there, such as WordPress and Wix. How do you know which ones are, first, excellent, and which ones will suit your website the best?  

Website Builders

Website builders may be divided into two groups: either as online tools supplied by web hosting companies and which are proprietary, or as offline software, which creates pages on a computer, which, in turn, are published on any web hosting company. This is a company that stores websites on its server. 

Regarding the first group, some web hosting companies will permit a website owner to install commercial tools (licensed and costly) or open source tools (free and easily available), of which some are known as content management systems (CMS; software application or programs used to create/manage digital content). The first group of website builders are also meant for those who want to build a private website, and this will be discussed further.

Anyone who wishes to start a website either for themselves or for small businesses can use website builders without having to pay someone to do it. The real challenge, though, is to find the most suitable website builder for your website out of the many, many website builders that are out there. Let us look at some website builders that are available, so that we can learn which one does what.

WordPress

The WordPress website builder is the most frequently used, seeing more than 28% of all websites on the Internet are powered by WordPress (or the self-hosted WordPress.org). The reasons for its popularity is that it is easy to use, its scalability (when a computer application/ product still functions well when (usually) increased in size or volume), as well as its powerful characteristics. WordPress.org is not to be confused with WordPress.com.

WordPress is free, and is known as an open source website builder. Open source means that the source code of such a computer program is accessible to anyone, and it can be studied, changed, and redistributed. It thus allows you complete control over your website, unlike most other builders. For this builder, a WordPress hosting account, which allows you access to all required server resources and to control them from one point, is required, and you will have to host your own website via a web hosting company, which is the quickest, easiest option. The advantage of WordPress is that you can control every part of your website, and you can build any type of website. The disadvantage is that you must manage your own website, and maintain it with updates, as well as create backups.

SiteBuilder.com

SiteBuilder.com is a website builder which is fully hosted, meaning that hosting is free. With SiteBuilder.com, thousands of website templates, which are pre-designed webpages, or some HTML webpages into which someone can "plug-in" their own text content, are available for all types of websites, and it also offers an e-commerce option for selling any items online. E-Commerce refers to electronic commercial transactions done on the Internet. There is usually a catch if you don’t have to 

pay, and here, you are restricted in the tools made available, as well as the fact that advertisements will appear on your website.

Wix

Wix is a much-used, cloud-based website builder, which is easy to use for building your website. Cloud-based servers are those servers from a cloud-computing provider which make applications available on demand. The advantage is that Wix is a fully-hosted platform, which means hosting is free-of-charge. You can choose from lots of templates for the design of your website, and each template can be edited with its drag and drop website builder, which is one of the most vital tools to make a website succeed. Wix also provides many free and paid applications that can be installed on your website, thus providing functionality, which is a range of operations that can be run on a computer. Wix supplies a free plan with a certain amount of bandwidth (a range of frequencies within a given band), as well as storage (keeping retrievable data on a computer). However, it does not include a domain name (part of the network address), so you will have to upgrade to another plan if you decide to carry on with your website. The only disadvantage with Wix is that Wix advertisements will appear on your website, and you will need to upgrade to get rid of them. Also, be warned – it may prove to be quite difficult if you would like to remove your website from Wix.

Seeing there are so many website builders out there, some criteria are needed that can be applied to any website builder you have in mind, and in this way, filter out the good ones from the not-so-good ones.

How to Choose the Best Website Builders

  1. Good Company Record
    One often hears of companies that are here today, but gone tomorrow. So, just from a perception point of view, companies producing website builders, and that have been going for quite a while can be more easily trusted – they are saying to potential clients that they are doing things right. For example, the website builders Wix, Squarespace, and Weebly are produced by well-stablished companies, which are all over 10 years old.
  2. Popularity of Website Builders
    The proof lies in the eating of the pudding, the saying goes. Well, if the builders in question are popular, then that speaks volumes. For instance, millions of websites have been built with the builders Wix, Squarespace, and Weebly. Linked to that is the fact that there are 45,000 new users of Wix every day. Growth in users of Squarespace, and Weebly, has been in the millions over the years.
  3. Increased Searches for Builders on Google
    Another indicator of whether a website builder is worth its salt is if users are searching for it on Google. By recording the number of searches for such builders made over time on Google, it becomes clear if there has been significant growth over the years, especially for WordPress and Wix in South Africa. Growth happens when people realize that they can build a website on their own without the help of an IT systems administrator. 
  4. Can you Help me, and will you Refund me?
    Everyone who is involved with websites will need professional assistance at some stage or other. Nothing can possibly be more frustrating for a client when he or she requires some technical support that is just not forthcoming. For instance, the three companies producing Wix, Squarespace, and 

Weebly can be easily contacted for assistance. Not only that, but each company is client-friendly, and has no-questions-asked refund policies.

Which Website Builder should you choose?

Once you have selected some excellent website builders, no one can tell you which of those builders will suit you the best. It all depends on what you like or not like. There are advantages and disadvantages to each website builder, and some disadvantages you may not find so disagreeable as other people would. The only way is to try out some website builders, and see which ones you like the most.

If you would like to try a website builder, Afrihost, for example, advertises one. With this builder, anyone can publish static web pages (web pages delivered to the user exactly as they were stored) consisting of more than 200 responsive themes for better usability. These are provided by all Linux pro-shared (sharing project settings) hosting packages.  Are you looking for more information? Please contact us for more information and we’ll gladly assist you or read our Web Hosting FAQs. 

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress
https://www.webhostingplanguide.com/reviews/sitebuilder-com-review/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Website_builder
https://www.afrihost.com/site/page/website_builder
https://smallbiztrends.com/2017/07/the-best-website-builder.html
https://www.websitebuilderexpert.com/how-to-choose-best-website-builder/

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