What Are the Best Ways to Create My Own Website?
While designing a website may seem easy at first glance, actually coding one can be much more challenging. Fortunately, a number of website building services exist that cater to every skill level, with many designed to make the task easy even for those with no coding familiarity at all.
With so manys services available, however, some inevitably end up standing out from the rest of the pack. These are the best-rated website development platforms out there, and no matter what your needs are, one of them is likely to be right for you.
Wix
Wix is easily one of the most recognized website builders around, with more than 150 million users worldwide. It offers an expansive selection of highly customizable templates, themes and web designs to help you get your website up and running quickly and in style without a lot of technical know-how. The free plan comes with a large range of features, SEO controls and no page limits. While free Wix websites do come with ads, they’re fairly unobtrusive. Paid plans allow for ad removal, custom URLs, analytics and more for businesses and individuals alike. Overall, Wix is best for users who want to focus on designing a stylish and eye-catching website rather than coding, although there are more advanced features available for those who wish to use them.
Squarespace
If you want to go all-in on a career as a blogger, then Squarespace could be your best option for building a site, as its wide selection of themes and features are designed specifically with that end in mind. Squarespace excels at creating sites that are heavily dependent on visuals, especially subjects such as fashion, beauty, travel, jewelry, and arts and crafts. It also makes setting up your website for mobile device compatibility easy, which can come in handy if you need to update your blog often. Squarespace has monthly and yearly subscription plans.
Wordpress
Powering nearly 40 percent of the web, Wordpress hardly needs an introduction. From its humble beginnings as a blogging platform, it has since grown into one of the most powerful and versatile development platforms around. You can create virtually any kind of website with Wordpress, from blogs, real estate and news sites to even online storefronts.
It’s worth noting that there are two separate Wordpress services — Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org. While the former offers free and paid plans with support services similar to Wix, the latter is completely free, but you need to provide your own web hosting. That can actually be cheaper depending on what you’re trying to do, and it comes with the added benefit of being able to customize your site with all sorts of plugins and even raise revenue from ads, but there are downsides as well. You need to be more proactive about updating your security with Wordpress.org, and those same plugins can introduce security risks that you’ll need to deal with one way or another. Choose Wordpress.com if you want to have an easier start, and choose Wordpress.org if you want more freedom to grow and develop your site.
Weebly
Weebly is a development platform best known for its intuitive, easy-to-use web editor, with approximately 40 million websites and counting using it. Weebly offers a host of stylish and responsive templates that take into consideration a lot of the little details that newcomers to web design might not think of, and it adapts well to mobile usage.
Weebly partners with Square to make e-commerce possible whether or not you have a paid account. You can even set up local delivery and pick-up.
Webnode
Marketing itself as a "polyglot" site builder, Webnode offers features that make it ideal for multilingual websites. Along with the usual range of templates and features, Webnode offers the ability to integrate YouTube and Vimeo videos directly into the site, and its helpful support staff are available five days a week. While its customization options are not as expansive as something like WordPress.org, it is easy to use, making it a great choice for beginners.
