A business website is the biggest stepping stone to success, pretty much for any kind of business. Whether you’re in the business of selling goods, or a photography enthusiast looking to make some money – a website can set you apart from competitors.
What’s more, with business website builders offering free trials and pretty useful free subscription packages, everyone has a reason to create a website to represent their business interests.
The Problem of Plenty
About a decade back in time, creating a business website used to be an onerous task, with very few DIY platforms available.
Today, however, you have plenty of them. In fact, there are so many business website builders available that you can easily get lost in the maze of choices. One offers terrific storefront designs, another offers easy integration with the 3rd party services you need the most, and yet another offers killer apps and widgets to take care of your business functions. How do you choose one?
In this guide, we try to answer your question by laying down several evaluation criteria you could use to shortlist the best business website builders, and eventually finalize one.
Specialty versus Generality
This is among the most important decisions you need to make – whether to go for a website builder that offers general purpose business websites, or to go for a niche website builder.
For instance, you will have options that offer substantial physical goods selling capabilities in their website builders, and then some that offer dedicated digital product sales functionalities. If your line of business is clear, with no foreseeable reasons to expand across significantly different product and service categories, a good al-purpose business website builder will work great.
However, if your business is characterized with unique requirements of physical heavy goods sales, digital downloads, subscription and membership sales, etc., you will be better served with a niche business website builder.
Design Quality
Website design and user experience design have massive roles to play in the success of your e-store. Any compromises in terms of website design can prove to be detrimental to the success of the project. The key aspects to consider are:
Quality and Variety of Storefront Designs: Though you only need one high quality storefront design to create your business website, it helps to have more options to choose from. Look for a website builder that allows you to easily switch themes if needed. Responsive themes are a must, considering that more than half business search queries are made on mobile devices.
User Experience Design: To a great extent, the best business website builder’s customization options help you take control of the user experience design. Still, a huge chunk of the checkout process, for instance, is inflexible. So, choose a website builder that helps you deliver the user experience you want.
Ease of Use and Exploration
The days of clunky, intimidating, and complicated website building interfaces are long gone; pick any modern business website builder, and it’s clear that the unflinching focus is on uncluttered, intuitive, and user-friendly website building experiences. Of course, there are some that are better than the rest, and here are some ways you can identify these gems.
- Do a quick sign up and sample web page run; ideally you should be able to create something in less than 20 minutes.
- Website creation wizards help you quickly set up a bare bones web store up in a jiffy; we recommend a website builder that offers this facility.
- Look for on-screen hints on the main website building interface; these prove useful in helping you explore the complete catalog of settings and features.
- Look for the extent, sophistication, and accessibility of helpful documentation, walkthrough videos, FAQs, and tutorials available online.
Like most things, there is often a trade-off between the ease of website creation and extent of customizations – more on the same in the next section.
Control of Customization
Imagine there being a dozen other business websites that look pretty much like yours! That’s not what you want, and website builders offer you customization options to help. Look for a website builder that allows you to easily change the basic design elements of the website, right from the typography to the color scheme.
Ideally, you’ll need a website builder that helps you customize your website, but without having to spend a lot of time. One click customizations go a long way in solving the problem for you. Experiment with at least 3 website builders before finalizing one, because the manner in which different builders deliver their customization options varies.
Look for a website builder with design element specific customizations alongside on-screen hints and tips to ensure you actually use the customizations.
Widgets and Apps
The purpose of a business website is, well, to sell products and promote your business interests. To help you with that, modern business website builders offer a lot of free and premium apps, add-ons, plugins, and widgets to add a lot more functionalities to the platform.
A few years back, only a couple of business website builders offered app stores, though such app stores have become the norm today. So, check out the website builder’s app store, and evaluate and breadth and depth of features on offer. Don’t fall for bare bones website builders that seemingly offer inexpensive website building, but then expect you to pay for most necessary features via apps.
With apps, add-ons, plugins, and widgets, website builders can add sophisticated sales and marketing functionalities to your business website. Email and social media marketing, appointment booking and scheduling, customer loyalty – you name it, and there are apps for you.
Support
Make no mistake, you will be stuck with technical stuff, some time or the later, and you don’t want to be left high and dry in such a scenario. That’s when customer support saves the day for you.
Take note – most website builders leave you to explore their online help literature to find means of troubleshooting, unless you have a premium subscription. With a paid subscription, settle for nothing less than at least 3 mechanisms of contacting customer support – email, chat, and call.
A business website builder that offers 24×7 phone support is worth your time and trust. Also, if you foresee a lot of growth in the near future, consider website builders that offer dedicated account manager to help you scale the website up.
Costs
We’ve deliberately kept cost for the end of the discussion (primarily because anyways you’re going to closely watch out for hidden costs, isn’t it?). Most website builders offer monthly subscription packages, with corresponding quantities and quality of resources.
Some ecommerce store builders charge you a transaction fees per sale. Other costs are linked to app downloads, special requests of plugins and theme customizations from customer support, and requisition of additional resources in terms of storage space and bandwidth.
Final Thoughts
The choice of a business website builder could be a deciding factor on how good your website turns out to be, and what level of traction it creates in the business sphere. Use the tips and tricks mentioned in this guide to make a good choice.
Lesley Haught is a professional writer, web developer and CEO of WebBuildersGuide. He has been working for 4 years as a web interface developer and has a huge experience in website development. He’s also fond of photography and marketing and of course, writing articles. His work is published in different popular online magazines. You can follow Lesley on Google+