When it comes to making a new website, many people these days are flocking to some of the free tools that exist online such as Wix and GoDaddy web builders. In this article we look at some of the pros and cons using these versus getting a professional web designer:
Ease of Use
As technology improves on a day-to-day basis, web or page builder are becoming better and better, and therefore much easier to use even for those with zero programming experience. Whereas in years gone by, you would need at least some experience using HTML for example, nowadays you can literally create the whole website with no knowledge at all of tags and code. This means it is much more accessible to the mass market, and literally everyone now can create their own website.
Hidden Costs
One of the key disadvantages of some of the popular ‘free’ website builders is the hidden costs that are involved. Although you can make the site free of charge, the hosting costs are very expensive in relation to a normal website host. In most cases, if you have a cheap web designer on board for your new website, it makes much more financial sense to hire a designer. However, if you are using WordPress (which requires a little bit more knowledge), then you have the best of both worlds, when it comes to a free website builder.
Time
Depending on which page builder you are using, you will need to be able to dedicate quite a bit of time to upgrading and maintaining your website. If you are using something like WordPress for example, then you will need to bring yourself up to speed on security. Although WordPress is a free page builder, it really does have numerous security weaknesses, that can quite easily catch out a website novice. With that being said, there are now lots of very easy to use plugins such as Word Fence that can do a lo of the heavy lifting for you, and really are just a one click install.
Display on Different Devices
One of the key things in today’s age is ensuring that your website looks great on all the different devices. For a novice website designer, there can be issues that you will run into whereby the website does not display exactly as you need it do on different devices. Even though this is improving all the time as well, this is where you might need some knowledge of code to make your website look great on all the different devices. When you consider that more people view websites on smaller devices these days, than the traditional desktop, it really is quite an important factor.
Website Page Speed Then there is the speed of the website. Google and other search engines now use the page load time as a ranking factor. Again, if you are using WordPress you will be able to use plugins to help you. However many of the other free website builders just don’t have these options, and so this can be a major drawback for some.
