Hiring a website designer and developer can be hugely expensive depending on the type of website that you want. For a lot of small businesses and entrepreneurs, it simply isn’t something that they can afford. That’s why website builders are becoming increasingly popular with small companies and entrepreneurs who want all the benefits of an awesome website without paying huge upfront fees.
But finding the right website builder to use can be tricky. There are so many different online options to choose from, how can you tell which is the best for you? We understand the difficulties of finding a mobile-friendly website builder. That’s why we’ve created this in-depth guide to help you to choose the best mobile website builder.
Finding the best website builder couldn’t be easier. Just follow these seven simple steps.
Step 1: Decide what you need from a website builder
For some small business owners, this might be easy. Maybe they only need a one-page website that lists their services and contact details. Others, on the other hand, may need a full e-commerce platform to help them sell their products online. The right website builder for one entrepreneur might not be the same as the right website builder for the next one.
There are a number of different specific things that you might want your website to do. One of the biggest and most important is for it to be mobile responsive. This is essentially a necessity today thanks to the emphasis that Google has placed on mobile-friendly search results. If your website doesn’t look good on smartphones, there’s a good chance it won’t show up in Google’s rankings. Or if it does it will show up further down than it should. But despite the importance of mobile responsiveness, some website builders don’t allow you to create a responsive website. You need a mobile-friendly website builder that does.
Other specific things you need to consider is if you need certain pages like a gallery, a blog, a photo section, a contact form or a shopping basket. As such, it is a good idea to plan out how your website will look before going ahead and looking at various website builders. Draw out all of the pages that you need, which ones will go on the menu and how they all link together. If you’re ever unsure about what you need, look at your competitors’ sites for inspiration.
Step 2: Draw up a shortlist of website builders
Once you have a solid understanding of exactly what you need from a website builder, you can start drawing up a shortlist. There are plenty of options when it comes to choosing a mobile-friendly website builder. That’s the problem! But, it is easy to start narrowing it down. The first one you can add to your shortlist is our own website builder. Since you’re reading our blog, you might know a little bit about us. But, you might not know that not only do we offer web design and digital marketing services, we also offer an easy-to-use website builder to clients on a shoestring budget.
Although we are based in Arizona, our website builder and digital marketing services can be used nationwide. That is the beauty of the digital age, but of course, if you’re looking for a website builder in Arizona or a digital marketing agency in Arizona, then you’re more than welcome to stop in to meet us.
We’re able to provide fast and attentive customer service because we are not a web giant like some of our major competitors. Some of the most common platforms are:
Wordpress: A global CMS platform that allows people to create a site from scratch. It has a large community but the platform is very difficult for beginners to get to grips with and problems are common. You’ll need a lot of ongoing support from forums or a company. Often people who choose wordpress will need to hire an actual web designer because it is not the most user friendly.
Wix: A publicly traded company that has been providing website building services since 2006. A lot of their created sites rely on Flash technology, however, that means they aren’t mobile friendly.
Squarespace: A private company based in New York that claims to have over a million paying customers. It doesn’t have the range of tools or add-ons that WordPress does and it is expensive.
Weebly: Another private website builder that claims over 40 million websites. But Weebly isn’t suitable for bloggers or for anyone who wants to move content away from the platform.
With this shortlist, you can then use the following steps to find the best website builder in Arizona or anywhere for that matter, for you.
Step 3: Look at the price of each builder
Given that you are using a website builder rather than a professional website designer means that budget is going to be an issue. If you don’t want to pay a professional, you also don’t want to pay a lot for a website builder, either. Some builders a free, while others will require you to pay a small or large fee.
WordPress can be downloaded for free and there are plenty of pre-made theme templates that can also be used for free. However, you will have to pay for the domain name and hosting yourself. This can often cost hundreds of dollars each year and is a pain if you aren’t a web-savvy person. Don’t get tricked into thinking WordPress is completely free, there are still costs to be paid.
Speenz, on the other hand, does offer a free mobile website builder in Arizona that can easily be used anywhere. We also have minimum hosting fees, however, these fees can be waived if the client has an ongoing marketing campaign with Speenz. You can get started today without providing your credit card information.
All of the other options mentioned here will charge a monthly fee. Depending on the package that you get, these all typically range from a dozen or so dollars up to around $50 per month. They may give you a domain for free, too, but you will be required to pay for it going forward.
Step 4: Find out the level of support you can expect
At some point, you are bound to experience a problem of some kind with your website. It’s just the way it goes. The server may go down, your content may go missing, anything could happen. Hopefully, it won’t happen often or at all, but when it does you need to make sure that you can speak to someone who can sort it out quickly. As a result, the level of support and the ease that you can get in contact with your website builder provider is a very important thing to consider.
If you use
Speenz’s website builder in Arizona, you know you can get in touch with us whenever you want. Our phone number is listed on our website and you probably have an email address for at least one member of the staff too. Heck, if you live near to our office you could even walk down and visit. But that’s not necessarily the case with other online website builders.
In most cases, it will be almost impossible to pick up the phone to speak to someone. They simply won’t offer that kind of support. You’ll most likely have to go through a long elaborate process of submitting a support ticket to their online helpdesk and then waiting 48 hours to hear anything back. This isn’t great when your business is at risk. In a lot of cases, paying more will mean better support so you will need to weigh up whether that is important to you or not. With Speenz, you don’t have to pay for quality support.
Step 5: Do you need to know HTML or any other code?
One of the main reasons why people use a website builder in the first place is that they don’t know how to code a website themselves. It is pretty pointless, then, to pay for a
website builder that requires you to know a bit of HTML to operate. That is the major problem with WordPress. While it can be used without knowing how to code, you will usually hit a problem that requires you to edit a template’s CSS page. This is impossible to do if you don’t understand how the code works.
Our website builder doesn’t use any code whatsoever. That means that anyone can make a website regardless of your technical knowledge. Many other online website builders will also have drag and drop template builders that let you create a website without writing any code yourself.
Step 6: How much customization is allowed
A website builder by its very nature will create websites that look similar in some cases. There are only a certain number of templates and designs that can be uploaded for customers to use. But the level of customization allowed between different website builders does change. The last thing you want is a website that looks exactly the same as everyone else’s. As a result, it is important to understand what you can achieve on each platform before paying for it.
With Speenz it is easy. You can start using our website builder in seconds without having to enter your credit card details. This makes it very easy to see exactly what you can do without committing. We believe there is a huge amount you can do with our platform and there is little risk of your website looking like everyone else’s. But we’ll leave the decision up to you.
Step 7: Do you get support needed to grow?
Using a website builder is a great way to get your business off the ground. But do the company who let you build your website help you to grow, too? Marketing, optimizing and adding to your website are crucial in helping your website improve and your business succeed. If you don’t do these things, you are going to be stuck in the same place forever. And you don’t want that.
That’s why, at Speenz, we are committed to supporting our customers who use our website builder grow their businesses online. We offer a range of
online marketing services, including SEO and PPC, as part of our paid packages to help you get into a position where you can pay for a tailored site to be built just for you. For us at Speenz, it’s not enough for you to just have a website. We want to make it as successful as possible and we are here to help you do that. Of course, you don’t have to use these services. But they are there if you need them.
Other website builders are unlikely to offer these kinds of services. Some may offer an SEO optimization service, but it is unlikely to be anything other than changing the page titles and metadata of your website. It certainly won’t be carried out by a team of SEO experts like Speenz.
Anticipating your need for these kinds of services in the future can help you pick the most suitable website builder today.
Time to make the choice
If you’ve followed each of the seven steps listed above, you should now be in a good place to pick your website builder. We truly hope you’ll give the Speenz website builder a try at no risk. If you’re still unsure about which company to choose, you may as well try out our website builder first since it is completely free and doesn’t even require you to put in credit card details to get started. Who knows, the best website builder for you may be right under your nose.
