Despite the pervasiveness of Facebook and Twitter, when it comes to getting a message out these days, you still need a custom website of your own. A real website, as opposed to a social media page, gives you complete control over design and content, and lends credibility to your business, organization, or personal brand. You can only look so distinctive on Facebook, but on your own site, you can realize a true brand image, offer products for sale, and integrate a multitude of Web services. It's never been easier to set up a professional-looking, design-forward website. Well-known site builders like Squarespace, Weebly, and Wix are constantly improving, and more competitors popping up all the time with their own clever new twists.
But let's talk a little more about why you even need a webpage in this day of social media domination of the Web. On a personal level, you probably wouldn't want to send prospective employers your Facebook page, so a personal website makes 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're delivered. Furthermore, having a real, dedicated site makes a business seem more authoritative and trustworthy than a Facebook or Tumblr presence on its own (though you should certainly also consider those services as elements of your online presence).
Getting your own website used to require a lot of tech wizardry such as knowledge of servers, HTML, site registrars, and Web hosting services, but thankfully, we live in the age of easy online site builders. The services included here let you make a well-designed, mobile-capable site with minimal technical knowledge. They can even take a small or sole-proprietor business to profitability, with buy links, online stores, and other money-making options.
Larger businesses spend thousands of dollars to get their custom-designed and programmed sites, but there's no need for smaller organizations and individuals to go to that kind of expense. For about $8 per month (or around $25 if you're selling products) and a few hours of your time, the services included here can help you create a unique, attractive website.
Several of the services included here offer free options, too, though if you choose that path, your site will include branding from the provider, which will necessarily make your site less impressive to savvy surfers—and shoppers. Free offers vary greatly in the allowed storage and bandwidth, so read the small print to find out how much you can get with each provider. I find that Weebly and Wix are the most generous with their free offerings.
With all these services, you build everything yourself using simple drag-and-drop interfaces. The services even let you include snazzy items such as social-share buttons, photo galleries, blogs, and even media players.
Start With an Address and a Template
Before you can start building your home on the Web, you'll 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 let you use a domain you've acquired from a third-party registrar such as pairNIC, but you must pay the site builder for the 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 DudaOne, 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. Some, such as Squarespace and Strikingly, restrict you to placing page objects in spots that won't make your site look garish. Other builders offer more freedom; if that's what you're looking for, check out Webs or Wix.
Mobile Site Design
Any site builder that wants to call itself modern these days must be capable of producing sites that play well on mobile, and all of those listed here can do so to some extent. Some, such as Squarespace and Weebly, use responsive design approaches to create a mobile site from what you built for the Web.
Responsive design is all the rage in Web design these days, but, in terms of SEO, search engines really just care that a site displays suitably on mobile screen sizes. Both Bing and Google have pages where you can enter your URL to see if your site plays on mobile acceptably. They're not concerned about whether it stretches as you increase screen size, in true responsive fashion. The responsive approach of Squarespace and Weeby, however, gives you no control over the mobile-only view. Wix, by contrast, offers a mobile-site preview and lets you make customizations that only apply to mobile viewing. For example, you may want a splash page to welcome mobile viewers, or you may want to leave out an element that doesn't work well on the smaller screens.
Photos and Galleries
Let's face it, one of the things we like best about the Web is looking at pictures. The site builders here all offer some degree of photo and gallery display. Some, like GoDaddy Website Builder, Squarespace, and Wix, offer loads of stock photography you can use. Some let you touch up images with editing tools such as cropping, brightness, and in some cases even Instagram-like filters. Others, such as Webs, offer no photo editing aside from resizing and positioning. Photo gallery options also vary widely. For example, Weebly offers a whole gallery of styles for your online galleries, while others like DudaOne and GoDaddy are more limited in gallery options.
Making Money From Your Site
Of course, if you want to go all out for sales, you'll want to move up to a dedicated Web shopping cart service like Shopify, but that's a step you might not be ready to take. All of the services here offer some ability to sell items from your site, if only in the form of a PayPal button, but some don't offer even 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. Only a couple of these builders let you put ads on your site, though most of them allow some degree of custom HTML inclusion.
Social and Site Stats
All of the site builders here let you put Facebook Like and Twitter Follow buttons on your Pages, and some even let you include feeds from the social networks. Some also give you help building a Facebook page and tying it into your site design and updates. Many products offer some sort of SEO tools, but too often this is just a form on which you can enter meta tags. You're mostly left to wrestle with that black magic known as SEO for yourself.
Most of the products here can tell you about site traffic, though the amount of detail varies greatly among them, and it's often tied to premium account levels. For example, Weebly can not only show you page views and unique visitors for each day of the month, but also search terms used to get to the site, referring sites, and top-visited pages. Wix, at the other end, has nothing in the way of built-in site stats, instead requiring you to create your own Google Analytics account and even that requires a paid account. Weebly even offers basic traffic numbers to free accounts.
Moving On
One downside of most of these services is that, should you someday want to move your site to another host, you'll likely be out of luck because of the custom code they use to display your site. Only three products here 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 and BoldGrid offer some transferability by letting you output your site in standard WordPress format, which you could take to another provider that specializes in managed WordPress hosting.
As you can see, there are several factors to consider when choosing an easy online website builder. Read the blurbs and then click through to the linked reviews below to find the one that best suits your needs. And don't hesitate to chime in below in the comments section to report your experience with a site builder, or praise one that's not included.
Looking for more advice before you get started? Check out our primer, How to Build a Website.