The Best Website Builders of 2017 Creating a Website Has Never Been Easier

The Best Website Builders of 2017 Creating a Website Has Never Been Easier

The Best Website Builders of 2017

Do you need a website for a personal project, an organization, or a small business? These easy online site builders let you build full-featured, mobile-

friendly sites on a budget.

Creating a Website Has Never Been Easier

To get your message out these days, you probably rely on Facebook and Twitter, with maybe a helping of Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Tumblr. That's sensible, but if you want an internet presence that truly represents you or your organization, you also need a customized website of your own. A real website, as opposed to a social media page, gives you complete control over design and content. This 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 third-party 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 newer competitors, such as Simply, Strikingly and unit, are popping up all the time with their own clever new twists on the process.

Why You Need a Website

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 to your Facebook page, so a personal website makes a lot more 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 can 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. Thankfully, we now 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 many 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 $10 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. If you choose that path, however, 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. Weebly and Wix are among the most generous with their free offerings if that's the way you want to go.

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 media players. Some even let you restrict viewing with a password and let you have people join up as members of your site (see the table).

Register Your Domain, Choose Your 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 usually must pay the site builder for that 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 Duda, 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.

Web Design Tools

Once you've chosen a template for your site, you need to make it your own. Most site builders let you tweak the color scheme, fonts, and page layouts, as well as adding new pages. A good site builder offers sub-templates for the most commonly used page types: about, contact, products, galleries, FAQ, blog, and so on.

Of course, you'll also want to add custom content to those pages. You do this by adding t