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Welcome to Website Builder Reviews. There are plenty of software choices available for building websites. I’ll be reviewing those that I have used, and rating them according to various criteria. I’ll also be recording some videos to show you how the various web design software applications work, how to make your own website and putting together a web design tutorial for each one.
For the record, I’ve probably built in excess of 200 websites since early 2004, using various website builders, with varying degrees of success.
When I started out, I had no idea what html was, had never heard of wysiwyg, and had never built so much as a homepage. Now, I can get by in html, build websites and blogs quickly and easily, and really don’t have to worry about the technical details of getting my sites online. This leaves me to concentrate on providing great content to my website visitors. However, all that is only possible because I’ve put the hours in, experimented, and asked questions when I needed to.
Let me tell you right now, there are vast differences between the software available to build websites, not so much in the end product, as in the process of building. My aim is to point you in the direction of website building
software that works, and to show you examples of the sites that I’ve built using the various packages. In fact, you are looking at the first example right now.
Once you have your domain name, and have sorted out your hosting, you’ll need to build your website.
Your first choice is whether to use free software, or purchase a program. The obvious benefit of free software, is just that, it’s free. Generally, you’re on your own in terms of how to make it work. If you pay for your website building software, you are likely to find user forums, customer support, a user manual, and perhaps even videos, to
help you. The quality of this “support” varies greatly – and is one of the criteria which I use in my ratings.
The first ever website building software that I used was called SBI or SiteSell by Ken Envoy. If you are an absolute beginner, you might want to take a look, if you have some experience of building websites, you’ll find the SBI process limiting eventually – you can find details here
In the past I’ve built websites without paying too much attention to the words on the page. That’s not the case any more. Every word on this page is here for a reason, the need to rank highly on the search engines for specific keywords. Learning, really learning how to do that, has involved many false dawns. Finally I discovered a course
that helped me to build content that works for you the visitor, and the search engines.
But building a website is only the start of our journey. Without visitors to our websites they may as well not exist. Ten years ago the mere act of publishing a website would guarantee traffic. Today the competition for website rankings is fierce, and more work will be required to promote a website, than to build it.
