If you own a business in today’s world you need a website, it’s as simple as that. However, hiring a web designer to create one for you is expensive, so if you have a limited budget creating your own site is often a better idea. Fortunately, there are lots of great tools available that allow you to create your own side quickly and easily.
If you need a site to promote your business, services like Wix or WordPress are excellent choices. They are very easy to use, even for total beginners and are quite affordable as well. You do not need to know any coding at all to make a professional-looking site and in many cases it will only take you a couple of hours.
Wix
Features
Wix is a site-building and hosting service that was designed to make everything as easy as possible. It only takes about half an hour to master the basics and you can have your site fully designed and ready to receive visitors in a couple of hours. With Wix, you design your pages by dragging and dropping elements, like text or images onto a page. It uses a template system to control your site’s design allowing you to instantly change the design of your site with a few mouse clicks. Wix is free to join, however if you want to build a business site, you really should upgrade to one of their very affordable premium packages and buy your own domain name.
Pros
Out of all the business site builders I have tried, Wix is by far the easiest to use. As I mentioned before, it will only take you about half an hour to an hour to learn enough to make a fully functional site. Its entire interface has been designed to be very intuitive to use. If you are looking for simplicity and ease, Wix is your best choice.
Cons
Wix does have some downsides. First, it is not really meant for large, complex sites. Also, any site you build with Wix can’t be moved to another web host. This could become a problem in the future, if you ever decide you want to move your site. You will then basically have to start over from nothing. Compared to regular hosting providers, you also do not get as many features.
Cost
Basic: Free to join.
Light plan: $16/month. You get all free features + 2 collaborators, 2 GB storage space, light marketing suite and a free domain name for 1 year.
Core plan: $27/month. All features of the free plan + 5 collaborators, 50 GB storage space, Basic marketing suite, a free domain name for 1 year, basic site analytics, the ability to accept payments and basic ecommerce features.
Business plan: $32/month. All free features as well as up to 10 collaborators, 100 GB storage space, Standard marketing suite, a free domain name for the first year, standard site analytics, the ability to accept payments and standard ecommerce features.
Business Elite Plan: $159/month. Everything offered by the free plan plus up to 15 collaborators, unlimited storage space, advanced marketing suite, a free domain name for 1 year, advanced site analytics, the ability to accept online payments, advanced ecommerce features and access to an advanced developer platform.
WordPress
Features
WordPress, originally a blogging platform, is now a tool that can be used to build any kind of site, including business and ecommerce sites. Compared to Wix, it is a little more complicated to learn. Also, you will need your own web hosting account in order to use it. However, learning the basics of WordPress is well worth it, as it offers you a lot of amazing features. After you learn how to set up and install WordPress, creating your site’s pages is very easy, similar to writing an email. You can easily change the way your site looks thanks to the thousands of attractive themes that are available. There are also lots of great plugins for WordPress. These can be used to add features like Facebook comments, an ecommerce store, an image gallery and many more.
Pros
WordPress is a very powerful and flexible platform that you can use to build complex, feature-rich sites. It has a huge support community, so if you ever need help you will be able to find it quickly. WordPress is excellent for sites with a lot of content and sites that constantly add new articles or other content. It makes organizing things very easy and its built in features ensure that visitors will always be able to find what they are looking for. Also, because you can install WordPress on most hosting accounts, you are not tied down to any particular host.
Cons
If you are completely new to building websites, installing and configuring WordPress will probably take you a while. You will need to read or watch a tutorial to learn everything. However, once your site is up and running, using WordPress is very easy. Also, if you want to build a small, simple site you probably don’t need most of WordPress’s features and are better off with a simpler site builder.
Cost
WordPress is free to use, however you will need a paid web hosting account in order to use it. These are usually about $4-5 per month for a basic package.
Conclusion
If you want to build a business website, any of the options mentioned in this article are good. Wix is easy, quick and perfect for simple sites. WordPress is great for large sites, frequently updated sites or even ecommerce sites.
