Website Builders- You don’t have to know HTML to build a website!

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Internet started getting popular 20 years ago, and it was hard to build up a website with cool features & shapes by oneself at that time.

Nowadays, people without programming skills might still think building a website is irrelevant to them.

However, as you may notice, it’s more and more popular to own a website yourself currently! There are WIX, Weebly (by Penn Stater), Go Daddy and so on. These are website builders, and you can easily decorate your own website yourself without any technical background.

Let’s explore website builders!

Squarespace vs Wix vs Weebly vs Jimdo - Google Trend

As we can see, the most popular website builder for now is WIX.

WIX empowers users to create their own websites in their own ways for free, without creating limits and coding. (http://www.wix.com/)

Here are some features for WIX in this video clip.

Let’s talk about the pros and cons of WIX compared to others.

PROS OF WIX

  1. Large Selection of Professional templates – Wix offers over 510 professional looking templates for you to choose from, or you could create your own custom design.  The best part about Wix’s templates is that they are already structured, formatted and pre-populated with content so you simply have to pick your favorite one, replace the pre-set content with your own.  All the templates are already user ready.
  2. Intuitive Drag & Drop interface – Wix’s website builder is simple enough to use.  Just drag and drop any elements (building blocks) you needs, such as images, slideshows, text, etc and place them wherever you want without any restrictions. There really is no limitations where you insert the elements.
  3. Support and help available everywhere – Wix has one of the strongest support infrastructure available amongst all website builders.  They have help / support buttons everywhere.  You can either click on the main help button at the top of the page, or each element that you use also has its own unique help button.  It’s nice that the help buttons are right there for you to click on without looking any further.  If you need a bit more “hand-holding”, Wix also offers you phone & email support..

CONS OF WIX

  1. Visibly large advertisements on the free version – Using Wix’s free website builder comes with noticeably large and prominent advertisement Wix logos on the side and at the bottom of the website after you publish.  All free website builders have their own advertisement credits (understandable since they’re providing services for free) but Wix’s are really quite prominent.  You will need to upgrade to remove the advertisements.
  2. Once you pick a template, you can’t change it – Although Wix has plenty of pre-made designer templates for you to choose from, once you’ve picked one to use, you can’t switch to another template.  If you do, you will have to rebuild your website.  It’s a bit annoying, so you have to make sure you love it!
  3. Not designed to manage complex e-commerce needs – If you want to build an online shop, Wix’s e-commerce tools are not advanced enough to help you fully manage your store.  But to be fair, they do have better e-commerce tools than most standard website builders, but they don’t include basic management tools such as sending out automatic confirmation emails to your customers after they pay, configure taxes and shipping costs, and just general management of orders such as marking orders as shipped or paid.

For last semester, I happened to establish some my own websites on WIX and Weebly. They are both pretty easy to use and powerful. You can build your own unique website in your own ways for free.

 

You may check them out if you are interested.

http://jasonxuxo.wix.com/showerpods

http://qishenxue-portfolio.weebly.com/

 

Therefore, will you be interested to develop your own website?

What’s your opinion about the website builders?

Reference:

http://www.websitebuilderexpert.com/wix-vs-weebly-vs-squarespace-vs-jimdo/

2 thoughts on “Website Builders- You don’t have to know HTML to build a website!”

  2. Hi Jason,

    I think your post is very good. It has a lot of information to look at. I am a Wix user. I use it because, like mentioned in your post, I don’t know anything about how to build a website. In my opinion, using Wix is convenient for that I can simply upload the photos, and the website provides users with pretty templates. Users can certainly customize their website, but if they don’t buy an upgraded version, they might not have much space to do so. I, personally, like Wix very much because it provides me a platform where I can create my own portfolio and can share it with many others. It is absolutely useful when you are finding a job or intern related to communications or designs.

    However, the main con would be that most users might not want to, or cannot afford to, pay for the pro version. Therefore, they are limited on more templates. Some people have no need to pay for $30 dollars to create a personal website. What they need is to have a personal platform. Another issue would be that once you choose a template on Wix, you are stuck with it. You cannot change template whenever you want. If you really want to change the template, you have to start everything over.

    Although I love Wix as a portfolio written in my resume, it is truly useful when you pay for the pro services. Otherwise, you just have a free image blog.

    Cheers.

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