Whether you wish to boost your business in the global network, find co-thinkers on the web or establish reliable online presence to reach certain objectives, you won’t go without having a decent website today. There is nothing surprising about this, because a professional and well-structured website can help you reach all your business or personal goals. It does not only present your company on the web, but also helps withstand niche competition, builds customer trust and drives more traffic from any country of the world.
As soon as you decide to create a website, you start looking for the available options. Actually, two of them enjoy popularity these days. The first option is to find a trusted web studio and order your website there. This variant may work well for business owners, who are too busy with their everyday problems to build a website on their own. This is also quite an expensive variant as you have to pay for the entire process of your website creation, starting with the idea development and up to the further maintenance and management of your ready made website. At the same time, you will not be in charge of the process and, thus, you won’t be able to make the essential website changes yourself, when needed.
The second option is much more convenient and simple from all the points of view. The use of website builders as the major web building tools allows creating a website on your own without any notable investment of effort and time. Website builders work great even for newbies, who don’t have any web building experience and knowledge. Launching a website with these services won’t take you long, which matters a lot for business owners. Modern website builders make it possible to create a quality website in the shortest time possible. What’s more, these systems are much more affordable than the services of web studios, which is another crucial benefit for most users.
Advantages of DIY Website Creation
- You Are In Charge of the Web Building Process. When you work on the development of your own project yourself, you have a chance to control each step of the web design process. Who knows your goals and aspirations better than you do? Correspondingly, you can bring your ideas to life, using your creative skills when designing a personal or business website yourself.
- The Deadlines. By having full control of the web building process, you can define how much time it takes to complete the project. It is you, who is aware of the deadlines and it is you, who can plan your work and your time with regard to the time you have at your disposal.
- You Save Your Money. When you develop a website yourself, you don’t have to invest into the web building process accomplished by web studio specialists. The use of website builders helps save your money as most of these services offer affordable plans that ensure safe and efficient web building process. What’s more, many plans come with hosting and domain name included. So, you don’t have to buy them. It’s also possible to design a website for free here, but you should always check the available restrictions a system might have.
- The Result Is Worth Your Effort. Websites designed with website builders feature high quality and functionality, which is frequently not worse than that provided by websites developed by web studio specialists. Such websites are functional and appealing. They can come up to any needs and preferences, which is one of their major advantages.
- You Improve Your Web Building Skills. The more you work on your website development, the better your web design skills become. Website builders are created with the needs of non-tech savvy users in mind and, thus, they feature simplicity, convenience and ease of use. You won’t find a simpler web building solution, which additionally ensures decent result. So, why pay more, when you can cope with your website design process yourself, getting web design skills and experience you might need in future.
With such an impressive variety of website builders, making the right choice often becomes a challenge. Let’s review some of the most popular and trusted services that are worth the attention.
IM Creator
IM Creator is a free website builder, which works great for creatives and business owners. The system is easy-to-use for people with diverse web design skills and expertise level. It makes it possible to build landing pages, portfolios, promo websites and other website types. If you are an artist, a musician, a photographer, a fashion designer or a representative of any other creative profession, who has the desire to showcase works in the global network, then this website builder is right what you need to reach the goal.
Websites launched with IM Creator are user-friendly and come with perfect SEO characteristics, which contributes to their quick and effective promotion. There is no need to possess coding skills to start a website with the platform. The process is intuitive and simple for everyone, including those users, who have never been involved in website building before. To develop your website layout, you’ll just need to select and arrange the ready made sections the system offers and fill them with content. You’ll be responsible for adjusting image settings, choosing fonts and icons, creating slideshows and photo galleries, setting animation effects and controlling lots of other elements of your website. It is also possible to launch a blog and an eCommerce website with IM Creator, which integrates seamlessly with Stripe.
The website builder comes with an extensive collection of responsive templates. For the ease of search, they are subdivided into several categories based on their topics. The major of them are Wedding, Business, Fashion, Blog, Restaurants and Popular template categories. Whatever design you will go for, you will be impressed by its quality, great look and abundance of customization tools that will give it unique design.
IM Creator is mainly focused on the web building needs of users, who are not aware of the web design basics. The system has a free plan for artists, students and non-profit organizations. This plan offers free unlimited access to all templates and eCommerce options, connect domain feature, unlimited hosting etc. It is devoid of ads, which is a notable benefit as well. There are also two paid plans meant for business owners, professional web designers, resellers, hosting companies etc.
The Premium Plan has unlimited bandwidth and hosting, 24/7 customer support and other features needed to design a decent website. The cost of the plan currently constitutes $8 per month. The White Label Plan allows using the website builder under your own brand for $350 per year (this is the one-time annual payment) to make use of the multiple features it offers.
Webydo
Webydo is an intuitive drag-and-drop website builder, which is a nice choice for professional web designers. The system’s interface and dashboard are a bit complicated for a newbie, but, if you have ever worked with Photoshop before, then you will quickly understand the basics of working with the editor.
The website builder ensures convenient and hassle-free web building process. By dragging and arranging the website elements (text, videos, images, Flash files, widgets, menus etc.), you create your website layout. There is also the Parallax scrolling animator here, which allows setting animation effects on any visual object of your choice, be it an image, a widget, a gallery and what not. Webydo also makes it possible to adapt custom typography, navigation settings, upload your own fonts to the system gallery, add and manage a blog and perform other actions to enhance the design and performance of your website.
Webydo is also known for its powerful eCommerce functionality. The system contains all the features and tools needed to launch a decent online store, but you’ll need to select the corresponding plan to use all these features. Unlike many other website builders, Webydo doesn’t have any app stores to let users select the required widgets and applications. Instead, the system is more focused on the way a website looks rather than on its performance.
When it comes to design, the system offers three options to choose from. Thus, you can select a ready made template to further customize it with regard to your needs, choose a layout that will affect your website structure or design a website from scratch. It’s up to you to make the choice depending upon your web design needs. Webydo has its own template collection, which is, however, not that extensive as compared to lots of other website builders. The templates are responsive, which matters a lot for contemporary users.
When you decide to use the service, you’ll be able to try its free trial for 30 days to test the features of the system. Prior to that, however, you’ll need to provide your credit card data to prove that you are going to use the system after the end of the trial. At the same time, you have an opportunity to cancel the subscription during the trial period for free.
Webydo offers three paid plans: the Pro Plan ($90/mo), the Team Plan ($180/mo) and the Agency Plan ($480/mo). The choice of the plan depends on your web design objectives, the number of websites you plan to launch with the system, the number of collaboratives and other aspects. The higher the cost of the plan is – the more features it provides. Even though, Webydo is quite expensive, it frequently offers discounts that allow using the service at cheaper cost. All in all Webydo is good also for Agencies, which can use it’s whitelabel program, manage multiple clients and use the ‘Bill My Client’ feature, provide the CMS with full or limited edit access, and make a clean HTML code that is good for SEO.
Mobirise
Mobirise is the downloadable website builder software that should be installed on your computer prior to being used for web building purposes. This is the major feature that distinguishes the system from the rest of the platforms reviewed in the article. You’re not in depend from any platform or service, so you can host your website anywhere.
However, the website builder is really worth the time and effort you’ll spend (this doesn’t take long) as its simplicity and convenience allow creating full-featured websites with ease. It works well for building promo websites, portfolios and landing pages, but you can also launch other website types with the system as well. Mobirise is a great start for newbies as it does not imply any coding or web design skills to reach stunning result.
Mastering Mobirise takes a few hours only – so easy-to-use and intuitive the system is. It allows saving effort and time due to the drag-and-drop website editor, which makes it possible to select the blocks, edit their content inline and arrange them on the page with no technical skills at all. The dashboard of the system is simple and contains a WYSIWYG editor, settings menu and a control panel, where you’ll need to add and manage the blocks you plan to use. To make your website accessible on the web, though, you’ll have to buy hosting and upload your ready made website there after it is stored on your computer. Updating the website is easy here and is done with a few clicks only. It’s also possible to publish your website at the local server or one of the external resources. Mobirise offers a nice choice of free extensions you can use to give your website excellent performance.
These are SoundCloud, Google Analytics, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, G+, Instagram Feeds, Social Comments, SEO, Cookies Alert and what not. You can also decide to kickstart your Instagram campain by investing a little in paid promotion. There are many websites which let you buy Instagram followers and likes.
Mobirise has free and paid themes you can customize to get a website you are interested in. They are comprised of the blocks, which can be modified and changed as you need. The themes come at affordable cost and help give your website professional look. These templates are used to launch portfolios, online stores, restaurant and lawyer websites as well as other projects. Mobirise is a block-based system, which lets you create a website layout by choosing and dragging the blocks onto a page. Having positioned the blocks as you need, you should replace the industry-specific built-in content with that of your own to give your website personalized look.
Mobirise AMP Website Builder is another highlight of the system that is worth the attention. Mobirise was the first website builder to introduce the feature that allows supporting AMP web pages. This is a unique tool that makes it possible to create AMP websites. What you have to do is to download Mobirise version 4.5 or higher and start building your website by choosing, adjusting and placing AMP components on a page to get the desired result. The tool contributes to smooth and quick loading of AMP websites and improves their search engine results. This is a nice solution for launching blogs, Internet magazines and new content-oriented sites.
One of the most impressive Mobirise features is absence of pricing plans. The system is absolutely free for commercial and non-commercial use. You just have to buy the domain name and hosting to make your website accessible on the web. If you wish, you can additionally get several paid extensions, but this is an optional offer that doesn’t have serious effect upon your website design and performance.
uKit
uKit is a website builder, which is a superb tool to build small/medium business websites, but it also allows launching other types of websites. The service is one of the easiest website builders you can find in the contemporary web building niche. It is convenient for everyone and ensures intuitive web design process for users with diverse experience and skills.
The website builder unveils lots of options that enhance the efficacy of the web design process and make it simple. The service has an extensive collection of widgets you can make use of to give your website excellent performance. It doesn’t take much time to integrate these widgets into your website. Some of them include Timer, Social Networking Buttons, Online Chat, User Comments, Service Calculator, CallBack widget etc. uKit is also known for its concerns about the safety of websites created with the service. Users, who wish to boost the safety level of their websites, have an opportunity to connect SSL Certificate feature. The website builder also features notable blogging opportunities. It allows adding a blog to your website, which helps build user trust.
Speaking about templates, uKit collection includes dozens of quality themes. Whatever niche you specialize in, you will surely select a template to come up to your needs and preferences. All the themes fall into several thematic categories, which include Automotive, IT Services, Cafes and Restaurants, Education, Sports, Landscape Design, Photography and more. There is also an opportunity to choose a blank theme and build a new website from scratch. All the templates are responsive by default. The system allows changing them at any time. The content you will submit won’t be lost as you change the theme. This is convenient and handy for everyone.
When it comes to the cost aspect, uKit has four paid plans and a free trial period, which extends for 14 days. The latter makes it possible to explore the system and test the features of the plan you are interested in. Paid plans include the Premium Plan ($4/mo), the Premium+ Plan ($8/mo), the eCommerce Plan ($9.6/mo) and the Pro Plan ($12/mo). Thus, you can see that even the most advanced plan offering lots of web design options is more than affordable to all categories of users.
Bottom Line
It’s impossible to go without a website today, if you wish to establish reliable online presence. Regardless of your objectives and intentions, you have to make sure your website is of high quality. Otherwise, it won’t be valued by your customers. There are two major ways to build a website today. You can either deal with a web studio or cope with the task on your own. While the first option seems to be simple and convenient, it still has a number of serious drawbacks, including the cost aspect.
Thus, website builders prove to be a better solution. They are easy-to-use, but powerful enough to ensure safe, comfy and effective web building process. You can find that very system, which works better for your personal web design needs and preferences. Being among the niche leaders and offering a broad range of web design options, IM Creator, Webydo, Mobirise and uKit rank high and are definitely worth your attention.
Howard Steele,
SuperbWebsiteBuilders.com
