Website Builders: What They Are and Why Use Them

A website builder is exactly what you would imagine it to be from the name. It is an online or offline application that gives you the ability to create reliable websites. In the past, it took a lot of effort and endless hours of coding to build websites. The entire process has been simplified by website builders in the digital marketing agency. But what is a website builder, and how does it work?

What is a Website Builder

A website builder is a tool you can use to set up, create, and design your website whether you have prior coding skills or not. You can completely design your website without involving a web designer or developer. It is a good option for those who wish to spend little money when they need a website. Website builders come with drag-and-drop interfaces, simplifying the task even more.

How Website Builders Work

Website builders follow a similar pattern. You need to follow these steps, depending on whether you use an offline or online website builder.

• Offline website builders must first be installed on your computer before you can begin designing, while online builders can be accessed and used as web applications through a browser.
• Choose a template that looks good for your brand and will serve as your design foundation. It will define how your website will look and feel.
• After choosing a template, customize it through the drag-and-drop window.
• Play around with fonts and colors until you find the best fit for your website. You can also add content like text, contact forms, social media buttons, logos, videos, and images.

Another easy alternative to following the steps is by going through a tutorial, let’s say you have chosen Shopify web builder and want to create a shopping site. You can easily find a Shopify tutorial on YouTube and follow the steps, this is far much easier since you can see what you are supposed to do as you do it.

Why Use a Website Builder

There are many reasons why people choose to use website builders, here are five reasons why:

Cost-effective: Using a website builder allows you to save some money. You no longer have to pay a web developer a lot of money to build your site. Website builders provide extensive features at friendly prices. Users are presented with several plans, and they can choose based on their needs and budget. The best part is that some website builders even provide free hosting and domain names, cutting down your expenses even more.

Easy to use: There is no doubt that website builders are user-friendly. Building a website requires technical skills and great coding knowledge and experience. Website builders simplify the process to the point that technical skills are not needed. You can select from several professionally designed templates when you begin designing your website, and with a drag-and-drop interface, you will be doing more dragging and dropping than typing.

Low maintenance: Website builders automatically maintain user websites regularly, leaving you to worry about other things. Maintaining your website is an essential practice if you want to keep your website responsive and secure. Website builders completely take away the hustles of maintenance.

Customization: Website builders offer a wide range of layouts, fonts, colors, templates, and themes to choose from. Allowing you to create vibrant websites that represent your brand image. Different website builders will have varying customization features, meaning that your website will not just look like everybody else’s. Some builders even allow you to add extra features to your website, such as galleries, forms, blogs, and subscribe buttons. Most of them also have plugins for even better customization.

Support and resources: Most website builders, if not all, give their customers sufficient resources and support they require to handle issues or complaints they may have. Most of them have phone numbers and emails, while some have documentation, forums, and knowledge bases for guides, tips, and tutorials for their users.

Types of Website Builders

Website builders come in various types, let’s take a look:

Drag and drop website builders: These types of builders let you create your website using templates you can edit and customize as you like. They are user-friendly and make site customization easy and affordable, but there are limitations to how much you can customize your site.

Customer management system website builders: CMS are the most common examples, such as WordPress. They make it easy to create, organize, manage, and publish websites. CMS integrates multiple web customization tools. They have a backend where you can create, organize, and manage the content for your website. This website builder is flexible and powerful. You may have to pay for themes and plugins for this type of website builder. Compared to the grad and drop type, CMS is good for people who want to come up with unique sites with specific features. You can create your preferred site with the features you want and be able to fully customize them.

Smart builders: This type integrates artificial intelligence into the design process. The main difference between them and the other types is that unlike the first two, which require you to choose a template, AI builders only require you to answer a few questions to automatically generate your website. All you have to do is provide some important basic information about the type of website you wish to build and how you would like it to be. Smart builders also smoothen the experience through personalized recommendations.

E-commerce website builders: They are specifically used to create online stores. Their features include product listing, payment gateway, shopping cart, etc. Popular ones include WooCommerce, Shopify, and BigCommerce.

Mobile website builders: These work specifically for smartphones. As more people keep using mobile phones to access the internet, mobile website builders help create mobile responsive websites adapted to multiple screen sizes.

Template-based website builders: If you prefer predesigned templates, this is the best option. This type of website builder comes with multiple templates to choose from. It even comes with features for easy website customization.