There has never been a better time to create your own website online. Whether you want to market your own personal brand, or that of your company, you can find a wide variety of easy and inexpensive options to meet your needs, without having to hire a professional web designer.
In the past, DIY websites were limited mainly to blogs, and having a beautiful website usual meant hiring professionals – a process that would take a long time, and cost thousands of dollars. Today, there are many popular web-hosting platforms providing clients with free, easy to use website builders. The technology and interface of these website builders has come a very long way, enabling you to easily build your own website cheaply, and often taking mere minutes to get set up and working out of the box.
There are many options to choose from. Some of the more popular website-builder platforms currently on the market include Wix, Squarespace, Weebly, as well as several others focusing on specific industries. Ubertor, in particular, offers a website builder specifically for real estate websites – including all the tools (such as an IDX plugin) that realtors need to run their online businesses.
When looking for the right fit for your or your business, it is important to test drive products to see what works for you. Most platforms (including Ubertor) offer free trials, which you should take advantage of to find what is right for you. Ultimately, if you have the time and budget, there is still no perfect replacement for hiring a professional designer to build a truly outstanding and uniquely customized website tailored to your needs (Ubertor also offers this service to our clients who need it), but for many people there are benefits to using a free website builder instead:
- No knowledge of coding required: Traditionally, to build a website requires in-depth knowledge of web-based languages such as HTML, CSS, and Javascript – no easy task for the layman. Website builders, by contrast, are purposefully designed with an intuitive interface that will allow you to make changes yourself right on the page, by drag-and-dropping content elements, or editing fields on the page. The goal of any good website builder is to provide a “what you see is what you get” experience.
- Visually appealing: Any website editor built for normal users will also provide you with professionally designed themes or templates for you to choose from. These will look beautiful out-of-the-box, and once you have added your own unique content and branding the best templates will appear highly professional (and in some cases even indistinguishable from custom designed websites).
- Quick turnaround: While there are many advantages to hiring a professional designer to custom build your website, the initial planning, testing, and time required will typically take weeks or even months before you will see your site live (subsequent revisions and tweaking may also force you wait additional time). A major advantages of using a cloud-based website editor is that you can have your basic site up and running within a matter of minutes, and adjust its appearance to your preferences within the same day.
- Easy branding: Any good website builder will make it easy for you to upload content, logos, images, etc. to promote your brand (or that of your company) quickly, and using the best practices in web design. This will remove most of the guesswork for setting up banners, body content, and footers, etc. and give you peace of mind that your branding will reach your audience as intended – a much more effective approach than trying to market yourself on a basic WordPress Blog.
- Access to quality stock content: Another benefit most good website builder will provide is high quality stock images available for you to use in your site at the click of a button. This will save you hours of time trying to search the web for content you would otherwise have to purchase to put on your personal Blog.
Our advice at Ubertor for new clients who do not yet have a strong performing online business is to strongly consider building your first site off of a customized theme or template. Regardless of which industry you work in, or which platform you choose, you should be able to find a quality base template with a website builder that will enable you to turn it into a beautiful site to showcase your product and your branding. Later, if you wish to take your business to the next level, you may wish to hire a professional designer – but for the majority of small businesses there has never been a better time to leverage technology to do it yourself.