Which Builder Platform should I Use to Build my Business Website?: A Few Questions to Ask Yourself

Choosing a Platform to Build your Small Business Website

Ready to build your small business website but not sure which builder platform to go with?  This will depend on your type of business and end goals. To help you determine those, here are a few questions to ask yourself.  I recommend you go through these in the order below and answer honestly.

First Ask Yourself...

• Will my team and I (realistically) be blogging extensively?
• Is Wordpress (or any self hosted site) the only industry standard in my industry (for example: as in large corporate, professional news media, custom web development?)

If you answered Yes to one of the questions above, you will most likely want to go with Wordpress (whether pushing through the learning curve yourself or hiring credible help.)  If you answered No or 'I don't think so...' to the questions above, move onto the next questions below:

• Is your business outside of one of industries mentioned above?
• Are you a mom & pop shop or brick & mortar who will not be blogging extensively (on a daily basis)?
• Will you need yourself or your non-technical specific staff to easily be able to update your website at any time?
• Do you feel like taking on a lot of new (less-intuitive) technology would slow you way down right now?
• Do you absolutely, positively, need to go the Do-it-Yourself route right now but have no interest in taking on too many moving parts and technologies?
• Do you like your builder to be fully supported and to be able to write a support ticket for help if something goes wrong and have it responded to quickly?

If you answered Yes to one or many of the second set of questions above, then I strongly recommend you consider going with a DIY builder website service like Weebly, Wix, or Squarespace to build your website.

"If I decide to use a DIY website service (each has a user-friendly drag-and-drop builder), which one should I choose?"

There's no (really) right or wrong answer to this, but you can see my personal favorite below in the last paragraph of this post.  As we mentioned, the three most popular DIY website builder services at the moment are Weebly, Wix, and Squarespace.  What I first recommend doing is utilizing the free trial version of each of these to play around with and build a trial site.  (Just make sure you don't publish it before you're ready.)  This will give you a chance to get a feel for the different designs (templates) each service has available to you and which appeals to your eye most as well as which builder interface you yourself find easiest.  (The easier it is for you, the less it will slow your business down in this case.)

Still need an easy way to build your small business website?  You can learn about my Favorite tool, and the one I use to create my very own website here.  I've been using it for years and I loved it so much I partnered as an affiliate to share it to help others.  Here it is - my personal favorite website builder tool: Weebly.

Need a checklist to help you see each item that should be included on your website?  Get the Website Planning Checklist below.