Whether it’s for a business or for personal, having a website is a necessary tool for anybody who wants to have a presence online.
The problem is that building a website can be very technical and unless you have a tech buddy who will work for beer, it can be very difficult to build your own website and it can be way too expensive to hire someone.
But never fear, online builders are here!
The thing is, there are some options now to build your website but build it visually. It’s like putting a bunch of photographs on a table and sliding them around to display. That’s quite a bit how it’s like with this online website builders.
So without further ado, let’s look at the best ways to build a website without coding.
Builderall
Builderall is one of the leading visual website builders. It does a great job building websites and far more, but it has a whole slew of additional tools that come with it.
You can get a base account for $9.95/month (with the ability to upgrade fairly cheaply) to get some seriously nice add-ons.
What do you actually get?
- Entirely cloud-hosted so the membership price is all-inclusive.
- ‘HTML5 drag-and-drop editor – You drop pictures and text on the screen and drag it around to get it how you want it to look.
- Responsive – It will adjust the pages you made so that they look great on phones, tablets, and PCs.
- Animated videos creator – Share videos you make on social media to get more traffic.
- Presentation builder – Create presentations to either put on your site or upload them to social networks.
- App Builder – Build actual real apps that get installed on Android and Apple phones. You build them visually so no technical skills necessary.
- Email marketing tools – The included email marketing engine and lead capture tools are very capable and more than enough to support advanced email marketing.
- Browser notifications – You can create those popups that ask visitors if they want to receive notifications or perhaps a newsletter.
- E-Commerce tools to integrate with Shopify.
- Payment tools to integrate with Stripe, Paypal, and more, so you can just charge cards for clients instead of having to build integration to receive payment via credit cards.
Now add in that everything is hosted for you so you don’t have to rent a place to host your website, upgrade it’s security to keep it safe, or do your own backups.
Bandwidth is not an issue. Your site can get as popular as it can and your price won’t go up. That’s a really good thing.
I wrote a review of Builderall here and the great news is Builderall has a 7-day free trial too.
WordPress
WordPress is a very common platform that’s in use by 76.5 million websites worldwide.
You don’t get as far as that many installs without having a lot of positive features about your software:
- Tons of plugins
- All website-driven (once installed)
- Auto-Upgrade capability
- Available in more than 70 languages
- Customizable theme system – download new themes
- Many built-in SEO features
- Free SSL Certification
With using WordPress, although you can download and install WordPress for free, you do need your own host. From my own experience, I suggest using Blue Host. Through my special discount link, you can get a free domain and hosting for only $3.95 per month. Click here to get the Blue Host deal. They even have a 1-click WordPress install so if you’re looking to go the WordPress route this is a great option.
Wix
Wix plans start at $13 per month for ad-free sites and is good up to around 3000 visitors a month.
Even though they have the Pro as the best value, I’d go for the Unlimited plan which is cheaper than the Pro but it still has unlimited bandwidth. The Unlimited plan will set you back about $17 per month.
So let’s look at what Wix brings to the table:
- Over 500 designer-made templates
- Mobile optimized (also called responsive) so it looks good on all devices
- Drag-and-drop webpage builder similar to Builderall
- 100 fonts built-in ready to use
- Scroll Effects – Add other dimensions to your sites with fade-in and such
- Wix Chat so you can chat with your visitors
- Free SSL Certification
SquareSpace
It has the same drag-and-drop abilities as the other website builders but the SquareSpace forces some structure where the others let you drag around freely.
Now, being able to drag around freely comes with its own set of issues where you have to manually fix alignment and such.
- Pre-made templates for professional looking sites
- Responsive website design – looks good on all devices
- Chart Blocks – Create interactive line graphs, bar graphs, and pie graphs.
- Starter Layouts – Get pre-made layouts for contact pages, about pages, and more and customize from there
- Template Switching – Install multiple templates and work on multiple designs at once
The Personal Plan for SquareSpace is $16 per month if paid by the month. You do get a free domain like with the other plan but you only get the basic blocks on that plan.
Summary
So there’s a lot of info above on different website builders but what does it all mean?
How can you know which one is better since they are fairly similar? It really all depends on what type of site you want to build.
If you are just building a personal site then either signing up for Builderall for $10 per month or signing up for Blue Host at $3.95 per month and installing WordPress is going to be your best bet.
If you plan on going the eCommerce route, then it will take a little more planning on what you want to do on the eCommerce side.
WordPress has the WooCommerce plugin that will help you do do the store and there is a ton of functionality to help you setup your store.
Builderall has Shopify extensions built in so that you can pick up Shopify (Shopify is an amazing eCommerce platform that I’ll address more in an entire article since it’s so big).
So what is my pick?
I’ve done both the Builderall route and installing WordPress on hosting. In fact, what you’re reading right now is on my WordPress install that I installed myself.
Keep in mind I’m an engineer so I build complex software all the time and I’m perfectly comfortable doing everything at a low level.
So I suppose my first choice is to setup a new account on Blue Host (I have a major discount link above) and do the 1-click install for WordPress. The new site is up online in an hour and I’m toying around with plugins and themes then. Blue Host is an industry leader and they’re dependable in both keeping everything online all the time and the support is phenomenal.
And did I mention they do all that for less than $4 per month? I’m not sure how they do it but it’s hard to pass it up.
Now, if I was doing more of a store, I would do that on Builderall. Builderall has some amazing pieces of software that you get as part of it. It has the Lead Contacts and Email Marketing built in. It has the ability to charge credit card yourself directly or instead integrate with Shopify.
It has the ability to build mobile apps right there on the website (think notifications about new products to people), and they host it.
The last one there is a big one in my eyes if you have a store. For me, one of my highest priorities would be to keep the store online and working for me and I wouldn’t want to have uptime as a regular thought. The site has to just be always available and the unlimited bandwidth means that all I’d have to do is worry about actually building the store itself and not worrying about the details.
So hopefully that helps you decide how you can build a website without coding.
Any questions, feel free to ask below.