Why This Matters
While there are many excellent web developers who can assist you with planning for and designing your website if you have some budget for those services, it is also possible to take a DIY approach to website building.
Resources
The 10 Best Website Builders of 2020
Best Website Builders for SMBs 2020
Article – How to Create an Engaging Website Design – Tools and tips to ensure your website is clean and engaging.
Recommendations
Some options to consider are:
WordPress: WordPress is the leading CMS, and the tool that most websites are built in today. It offers a powerful, but easy-to-use website builder with a very wide range of customization options and plugins. Almost any functionality can be accomplished using WordPress, and it is competitive with the most robust ecommerce site builders for features and design options. However, as your site becomes more complex, so too does the learning curve, and without training or previous experience, it can be hard to harness the full potential of WordPress. This is balanced by a robust community marketplace for ‘plugins’: pre-built tools to be added into your website to extend the functionality quickly, easily, and in many cases, free of charge. WordPress is absolutely free when using your own domain.
Wix: Wix is a drag-and-drop website builder. It offers a wide variety of different design themes and hundreds of apps. It’s also highly customizable and designed to be very user friendly and easy to use, and can produce beautiful, professional looking websites with no preexisting experience. Some slight disadvantages are that Wix prices ($23-49/month USD), while reasonable, aren’t the lowest, and it doesn’t offer the most plugins or the best ecommerce store tools. It also doesn’t offer 24/7 tech support, as some other DIY website builders do.
Weebly: Weebly excels at making professional looking websites inexpensively—provided you don’t need lots of fancy features or ecommerce capabilities. Its drag-and-drop functionality lets you easily set up your pages, and its default templates look great on desktop and mobile. While it technically does have ecommerce features, they are much more expensive and limited than those offered by SquareSpace. They also have fewer customer service options than other providers. Pricing ranges from $6-26 USD/month.
Square Space: Squarespace is an excellent choice for small business ecommerce websites. It offers all the features a smaller online store needs. It has built-in functionality that lets you accept credit card payments, track customers, create gift cards, and so much more. It also offers a large suite of plugins that can be used to provide virtually any ecommerce functionality you could need (ie – tracking your inventory, highlighting certain products). While it is relatively easy to use, there is a bit of a learning curve compared to Wix, and functionality is sometimes hidden by tabs and sidebar menu. Pricing ranges from $18-40/USD month, which is quite reasonable for the level of functionality.
GoDaddy: GoDaddy is great if you want to be able to set up your website very quickly and easily; many can be created in less than an hour. The interface is very user friendly and intuitive and makes relevant content suggestions. GoDaddy has more limited customization options and is better described as a competent tool than an exceptional one, meaning that visually it doesn’t compete with a provider like Wix, or have nearly the eCommerce capability of SquareSpace. Pricing ranges from $10-25/USD month.