Our recommendations on the top 3 most popular website builders. 

As a startup ourselves, we are familiar with wearing many hats. Employee management, IT administration, policy reviews, ensuring debits/credits are in the right place and oh yeah... marketing ourselves! 

When you're a small business or just starting out, your website is the number one channel to market yourself; it's the 21st century equivalent of a calling card. 

As marketers, we pay lots of attention to our website, but if you're not a marketer, you may not give your website design enough consideration. The primary focus of a modern, well-designed website is to secure more leads for your company. Having a website that positively expresses your brand and makes a good first impression on visitors gives you a platform to communicate a consistent message throughout your marketing efforts.

But, how do you create a modern website if you don't know anything about web development and your are tight on cash?

Below, we've compiled a list of the 3 most popular website builders to help you create, manage and market your organization's digital footprint. These platforms will support your preliminary initiatives and grow with you until you're ready to migrate to a more robust platform with integrated marketing automation functionality. 

Background

With advances in technology and reductions in website costs, it's never been easier to launch your brand in the market. Companies like Squarespace, Wix and Weebly have done the heavy lifting in terms of backend website development, and offer templates and drag-and-drop functionality that a non-developer will appreciate. 

These platforms are an all-inclusive option providing everything you need to build a modern website. Website builders are different from other CMS solutions. Instead of purchasing and implementing a platform that provides a developer toolkit and requires both backend and frontend coding to create the website, (i.e. Joola, Hubspot, Sitecore, etc.), a website builder offers simplicity and out-of-the-box pre-built components requiring no development experience. 

When evaluating any technology, particularly your company's website, you need to consider both the long and short term business objectives and skill requirements before making an investment. For example, if you want detailed information on every site visitor's interactions with your website to be stored, or if you want the ability to personalize content based on certain patterns, you'll need to investigate options that include marketing automation. 

In the long-term, selecting a website platform affects your versatility, functionality and brand. In the short-term, it can take away many of the headaches incurred when building out a website. All of that being said, there is no "best" or "#1" choice. There's only the right choice relative to your goals, experience and circumstances. 

We are going to break each website builder's options down to price, design features, marketing features and support. 

Check out these links to learn more about each platform's pricing tiers:

Conclusion

If you decide using an all-inclusive website builder is right for you, we recommend signing up for a free account or trail to test the features for yourself. The final decision truly comes down to what you believe are the most important features out of the gate. 

Building a website is an investment of time and money. It's important to conduct your due diligence and check to see which website builder fits your business goal(s), experience and circumstance.