What is the most user-friendly website builder?
Once I start publishing books, I want to have an ecommerce site to sell them. I have next to no coding experience, and so wordpress intimidated me as a website host. In my brief research, square space seems like my best option. Do you have any other suggestions/insight?
As for eCommerce, I recommend you to try Magento. It offers a lot of great capabilities which will come in handy for your business. Also, there are some cool services like the one from http://www.mageplace.com/mageplace-services/magento-custom-development.html where you can get custom extensions developed for you specifically. Hope you will find it interesting and helpful to you, good luck ;)
There are a lot of good, well-integrated eCommerce sites where you can open a shop and sell your product far easier than building your own website. Even with the cost of commissions, such sites handle the sales transactions, deliver the product digitally, offer tools for managing your products, and typically much more.
This is a complicated question. It is hard to say what website builder is the best as each of them has its pros and cons. If you can't make a choice, I can recommend taking a look at a review of the most popular website builders on http://www.beautifullife.info/web-design/15-best-free-website-builders/. Personally, I found it useful and it helped me to choose a proper web builder for my site creation.
There are few good website builders, and most of them have great features! Yet - you're looking for most user-friendly one. And the answer is simple: you need to seek website creator with the best balance of functions and interface. As a good alternative - try WebWave.me. It has a lot of features, easy-to-use interface and if you are familiar with layers on the project (like - for example - in Canva or more professional graphics software) -you'll feel there like in a home. Free option has all of the features, including easily accessible SEO tools. Premium is a lot cheaper than the other alternatives plus you'll get a lot of great extras (very own e-mail, free SSL and other). All of that only for 7$ per month, and even cheaper. Wanna try? https://webwave.me/
I personally like the service from https://weblium.com for this purpose. They will create a website based on your words and then you will get an access to their cool drag-and-drop website builder. I think it is one of the most user-friendly ones and you will like it too, take a look ;)
Judging from my own experience, I can suggest that you use Weebly. It really allows you to create your own website, blog or social community without having to know any programming language. By the way, it's totally free. Nevertheless, make sure to check out other free website builders presented in this article http://www.mgwebmaster.com/free-website-builders/ .
I have used sitebuilder very effectively. It lets you build and publish the website within minutes if you have the content text.
Yes SEO SEO SEO... Findability is to a web site what location is to a bricks-and-mortar business. Bad location = few "walk-in" customers.
I personally vote for Moto CMS 3 website builder. It offers so many beautiful and user-friendly templates on http://www.templatemonster.com/moto-cms-3-templates.php. Btw, using these templates, anyone can build hisr own website without any web design knowledge.
You are actually making a good point. Wix is good. But the case needs to be studied more, for example the are a low visiability and less oppertunities for a wix site, than to an actual real site you created yourself. Please read more about this here its pretty good http://www.beautifullife.info/web-design/10-best-ecommerce-builders/
Wordpress Genesis... Easy and the best way to develop website.. Else, there are few other website builders like Wix and Yahoo.
Once you go through the WordPress learning pains, it will be WAY WORTH IT!!! as You can do SOOO much more, but if you want to simply get a site out, then yes, squarespace, wix, weebly, a web developer, are all good choices.
My girldfriend took out 2 weeks of her life and with ZERO coding (and no help from me) she simply googled a few things asked a few friends and now she uses WordPress very well and loving it and SO glad she took those 2 weeks of sleepless nights.
I would suggest my favorite CMS - Concrete5
Highly flexible, it is extremely easy to use and setup and once you get the hang of it, Concrete5 can prove itself to be one of the most user-friendly softwares you will ever use for building your websites. The Dashboard offers you all the navigation options that you can ask for. There's a Composer to create and edit content, as well as a File Manager, Reports section for statistics and analysis, and various other sections. All content creation and editing is done on-page. In order to edit elements on the website, simply click on them, and choose the required Edit option from the context menu.
The worth of a CMS is measured by the affection it receives from its users. Concrete5 has a loyal user base and community. The documentation is well populated. The forums are active, and you should never feel you are on your own when using Concrete5.
Concrete5 is a wonderful piece of software: free, open source, easy to use and extend.
The following are the user-friendly website builders
1. Weebly-Easy to use
2. Wordpress- Easy to use, great marketing results and lot of options.
3. Wiz- A flash based tool. I recommend you not to use this. It won’t give you excellent marketing results as search engines will not be able to read your website.
4. SquareSpace- It is fantastic in every way.
I would recommend you to go with WordPress or square space. If you are about to sell products online, I would suggest you to avoid WordPress.
I've been working with WIX for a while - it is very user friendly and free to start using. You will find though that adding the features you want will begin to cost and they are not transparent about the cascading pricing models they have. They do have decent blogging and SEO. However I don't think they can enable sales of digital media, only physical products.
What you don't realize is that Word Press is the best content management system platform out there to build your website, because it's not only user friendly but this software contains just about any kind of plugin you need to add more functionality to your website without extensive programming needs. You don't even have to host your website on the Word Press hosting server. All you need is the PHP script, find a good reliable web host, and upload the script to your server. Just follow the installation and configuration instructions, and you can walk away with a professional website with clean HTML coding and wonderful features.
I echo Sprigley's comment. I tried a ton of different site builders before Weebly, and never found one as user-friendly and flexible. It's very inexpensive, and includes a blog (which I agree you need to have) and e-commerce module. You can check out my website built using Weebly here:
www.greatbooks.biz
I think word press is easy way to build new website most of new website builder user are general prefer word press it is easy to used as compare to joomla/magneto . I'm just trying software if any one want to try visit this site-http://mobilesitemachine.net
I have to answer this with an extreme degree of bias, considering I am a web designer: the best avenue in every case is to own your own website.
Every "website builder" (these services have become the new flavor of the month) from GoDaddy to 1&1, Squarespace, Wix and all of the other 'clones' are all dirt cheap, and they'll make your business look similarly, well, "cheap." You're also near-guaranteed to never rank in search engines for anything significant when you use these services because most of them are pooling their site structure from pre-baked templates, which have already been used by tens of thousands of other customers. They also "backlink" to their parent site and are basically leeching 'clout' off of your site (for instance, visit any GoDaddy Website Builder site and it will have a link pointing back to GoDaddy at the bottom - this is murder in terms of SEO).
They also rely on you (presumably, someone who probably does not have a marketing & web development background) to structure your own site, which is something that traditionally involves a marketing plan and a website flowchart in a professional setting. It's like attempting to fix the gas main in your backyard when you've never held a tool in your hand before.
With your own website and your own domain, you'll be able to expand your site in the future. Expandability is everything, and you can only get it with a content management system like Wordpress, Drupal or Joomla. These "build your own" services are cheap for a reason: no serious business or brand owner would even think of using them to build a serious website.
If hiring a web design agency is too expensive, look toward sites like eLance and find a freelancer who will set up a simple Wordpress site for you -- you'll thank yourself for it in the long run.
This topic is the most frustrating one in my industry. Basically, Godaddy and others are attempting to hijack the web design industry and cheapen it with these "build your own" services, which are glorified in TV commercials, but in reality, produce awful looking sites that are elementary in nature and not properly designed to bring in leads nor sales.
As a (also biased) web designer, I think you touched on some great points Mark. There are plenty of website builders available that allow anyone to put a website together in a day or two. However, as Mark pointed out, there are some major flaws associated with these cookie cutter sites. I could write you a book, but without a formal education or inherent talent, you (and the general public) probably won't want to read it. The same is true of websites. A lot of thought, planning, research and creativity goes into making an effective website.
There is so much truth to the statement, "You get what you pay for" when applied to web design. I'd encourage you to make an investment in yourself and your products and hire a web designer to develop a site for you based on the goals and objectives you're trying to achieve online. A local start-up or freelancer is another source to consider. Generally they'll have lower prices than a design agency (less overhead to cover). Good Luck!
Thanks for the perspective- I'll keep that in mind! Those all sound like fair points.