subject: Website Builders Can Make Your Life Easy, or a Nightmare! [print this page] Website Builders Can Make Your Life Easy, or a Nightmare!
Free, cheap or expensive?
The first thing you'll need to think about when you create your own website is whether the website builder you choose will cost you an arm and a leg or whether it's affordable. Of course, many people would love a free solution, but these are often difficult to get the hang of or don't have very good documentation as the program is mostly developed by volunteers. You may be lucky enough in this case to have a vibrant forum where users are able to help each other very quickly, but this is not always the case. There are free website builders out there, but you will see that the good ones always have a large support feature by way of articles, faqs and forums.
WYSIWYG or good old Notepad
There are cheap and expensive solutions available as well, mostly sold as standalone programs. Some of the more popular ones are very good, but in the past they have been plagued with several problems. The idea behind these WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) programs is that you see your website as it will be when it appears finally on the page. One issue with this is that it distracts from the creation of content. Too many bells and whistles at an early stage of site development have the potential to keep you procrastinating and trying to understand how everything works, instead of firing up Notepad and actually getting some content done.
Syntax error: Your computer just choked
Another problem that was more prevalent in the early days of the Internet was that although we see a pretty design and website as we create it, this doesn't translate very well into code that all computers and all browsers can understand. This isn't so much of a problem any more these days, as most software developers will comply with WC3 standards, but there are some notable exceptions, especially in the browser department. Some fancy effects you can achieve with CSS for example, will show up differently or not at all in Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and many other browsers. This just means that you'll need to test your site on many different browsers and try to identify where the problem is to fix it.
Maximum help with templates
Starting out on any new program is always a challenging experience even for the most technically savvy users. When you create your own website, you really don't want to spend hours and hours reading instruction manuals on how to build a site. The best thing is to jump right in and sink or swim. On the other hand, there's nothing wrong with providing a life-raft to your users, so any good site builder will have loads of templates to choose from. These templates will be your starting point for your website. A lot of people are scared of templates, they feel that they are too restrictive. For instance, a template labeled as a 'fashion' template is really just called that because it had to have a category name for people to find easily. The template is just something that you can apply to any website, it doesn't have to be used exclusively for fashion sites.
Templates should also be very easy to modify and manipulate. Changing colors should be easy, elements should be easily removable and replaceable by elements from other templates, images should be easy to add, resize and alter and text should be easy to copy and paste or type right in the template.
These are just a few of the tips and tricks to look out for when you are selecting a good website builder.
