In todays world we’re spoilt for choice.
When it comes to making a website we’ve got several options, but which one is the right one?
Let’s take a look as we go through the top 5 platforms.
Wix
This is the platform we use at Alan’s Tradie Websites.
Having used Clickfunnels, Wordpress, Shopify, and Adobe Dreamweaver, we were looking for a platform that offered maximum creative flexibility, powerful capabilites and be easy to use.
Wix allows us the most design freedom, comes packed with powerful features ‘out of the box’ without needing third party apps and plays nice with other apps and code should the need arise.
Wix is comprised of the Dashboard and the Editor.
The dashboard is crammed with features.
It is an overview of your website with all your settings in there (similar but better than C-Panel), traffic analysis, content management system (CMS) customer relationship management (CRM) and inbox for website contact form leads and chat widget leads all rolled into one.
The drag and drop editor is super easy to use to edit your website.
We also have the Velo script editor to implement more advanced coding requirements on the website.
Wix hosts the website itself on global servers and has never had an issue with security.
Wix won CNET’s Best Website Builder Overall in 2021.
Wordpress
This is a blogging platform that became the most overused generic website design platform.
Most websites on Wordpress are cookie cutter replicas of each other because they are based on templates.
Wordpress relies heavily on third party apps to do anything other than blogging, thus it has high maintenance costs and critical security vulnerabilities.
Most web designers charge maintenance fees on Wordpress websites because they need to manually update the third party plugins every month or so to keep them working properly.
They also need to manually ensure the security is working. Contrast this to Wix, where it automatically updates itself.
Wordpress doesn’t host websites itself, so you’ll need to connect it to a hosting product inside your domain's C-Panel.
Squarespace
Squarespace offers an online platform for hosting and editing websites.
However, as of writing this article (24 Feb 22) thousands of users were reporting having issues with their website.
Most complaints told of being unable to log into the dashboard, unable to edit anything and losing their website completely.
A few mentioned not being able to contact Squarespace about it either - no phone number, no live chat, nothing!
Check out Squarespace’s twitter account if you want.
There’s people on there complaining, there’s even web design agencies on there saying all their clients think they’ve deleted their websites!
Weebly
I used Weebly briefly.
The problem was the lack of design freedom - everything was limited to pre-designed blocks that you had to work within.
This made it feel like I was working from a template vs from scratch.
Shopify
The go to choice for many in e-commerce, where Shopify falls down is the difficulty in design.
Out of the box Shopify is limited to a handful of free templates that are super basic.
To do anything nicer you’ll have to use paid templates which cost around $300 USD each.
And to make anything unique would create many hours of coding.
I've worked on various revenue generating Shopify websites before niching my business into Wix websites for tradesmen.
There you have it folks. A web designer's breakdown of the different platforms.
From my experience and how I see the facts, Wix is the best platform for the success-driven tradesman to have his website built on.
Alan Frye