There isn’t a right answer, it all depends on your skills, on what you want to achieve with your website, your budget, and much more.

We will take a look at this question from very different points of view so you can decide to yourself what path to choose.

The pluses and minuses when using a website builder

As the industry says, website builders are being used by millions of people.

Probably most of these people are beginners that need a super basic website.

Among them are also professionals that use website builders like Webflow which is a totally different builder.

Webflow is probably the most difficult-to-use website builder, and probably the best you can use if you know web design, and you have great web development skills.

Anyway, let’s see which are the pluses and minuses of website builders.

Pluses

– Easy to use

– Plenty of themes available

– All-in-one package

– Extremely easy to set up, with just a few clicks you can create and have a live website.

– Free to use if you are ok with a subdomain.

– Affordable

– Secure

– Fast

Minuses

– If you will use a template, the biggest minus is that your website will look extremely similar to many others.

– To use all website builder features, you have to pay extra.

– The monthly fee can go up to tens of dollars.

– The design process is very limited.

– Follow the design process of the website builder and you will have a website immediately, but your website will not look and feel as you might expect.

– Website builders are great most times for creating general websites.

– Limited fonts

– Usually, it is hard to install new fonts.

– Hard to migrate the website to another platform.

There are many more good things than bad things, but before you decide if website builders are the right solution for you, you have to try them.

Try at least 3-4 website builders and see how they work, and how much they cost.

A $30 fee per month maybe is not so much but when you calculate the annual cost, for 2 years, for example, you will find out that the total cost is $720.

If you use WordPress, your cost in 2 years might be just the hosting, around $100 or even less.

Now let’s discuss WordPress

WordPress is the most popular CMS platform in the world for good reasons.

The platform has lots of advantages.

Pluses

– Free to use.

– Very simple to use, even for beginners, and first-time users.

– Fast

– Secure

– SEO-friendly

– Great for any kind of website and landing page.

– Page builders are free to install.

– Tons of free and paid plugins will add many features to your website.

– Lots of knowhows, you will easily find someone to help you with something on your website.

– Free and highly affordable templates.

– Simple to install new fonts.

– Cheap hosting

– Easily to find designers for your custom website.

– Huge potential for upgrading and growing your website.

Minuses

– I find WordPress websites quite slow when compared with websites created with website builders.

– Hackers and bad guys are constantly attacking WordPress websites, so you always have to update your WordPress CMS and plugins.

– Custom WordPress designs can cost you tons of money.

Conclusions

Both website builders and WordPress will work just fine for your business, I don’t think that you can go wrong with any of these 2.

But have in mind the associated costs, especially on the long run, and the support that is available for each solution.

The post Should you use a website builder or WordPress appeared first on WhatFontIs.com Playground.

This is the biggest and most important entrance in the website builder’s niche; the giant Microsoft having almost unlimited budgets and some of the best people in the world.

But it is not the only one, WordPress also launched its own premium website builders. We will discuss it in another article.

I bet that the existing website builders are not happy with this move. No one has the power of Microsoft and they will soon start to lose a part of their market share.

And what makes things even worse for competitors is that Microsoft found a super clever way to uniquely position its website builder, through a super collaboration with Facebook. I will explain it a bit later.

Website builders market share

Now let’s see how the website builders market share looks like. The information is from 2020, and it was provided by SiteBuilderReport.

It is interesting to see some stats, right?

As you see, WIX is by far the most used website builder on the market and because of that it will also be the most exposed to Microsoft website builder entrance.

WIX has over 4.5 million powered websites which is A LOT.

How much websites will WIX lose to Microsoft? We will see in another year when I plan to do a follow-up for this article.

What we know about Microsoft website builder?

Let’s see what we know about Microsoft website builder, there are some cool information.

• Microsoft website builder is under the Digital Marketing Center division.
• It is addressed to small companies that don’t have an online presence.

Over 36% of small businesses don’t have a website and this is a huge problem for them as 80% of customers are making their research online before visiting a store and make a purchase.

• What problem wants Microsoft website builder to solve? They will remove the barriers of costs and lack of time of small businesses to create websites.
• How it works? The website builder will automatically import all your information from your Facebook company page.

But you can also use it separately, as a standalone website builder using the included components.

• 100% free to use.

How to create a website with Microsoft website builder?

The process is very simple and straightforward, especially if you will choose to build your website from your Facebook page.

Step 1

Begin by signing up for a Digital Marketing Center accountOpens in new window.

You will be asked to provide a website; select the option I don’t have a website. Help med build one for free.

Write your website URL and hit continue.

Step 2

After you sign-up, click on My website in the upper right part of Digital Marketing Center screen.

Now you can choose between these 2 options:

1. Import information from your business’s Facebook page.
2. Build it yourself quickly and easily using website components.

Select option 1.

Step 3

Now you will be brought to the website builder view.

The software will pre-populate your website with components based on your Facebook page information.

You will be able to customize all these components:

• Headline and description
• Customer action button (Call now, Send email, Get quote, etc.)
• Cover image
• Business summary
• Social posts
• Reviews
• Gallery
• Business contact information
• Social links

After you make all the edits you want, hit Publish on the right corner to make your website live.

The whole process is very simple and quick.

And let’s not forget, it is totally free.

Conclusions

Microsoft own website builder will have its own place in the niche, and I am sure that it will find millions of users very fast, in less than a year.

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The whole world has now a super powerful competitor in the website creation niche.

The custom website that WordPress.com will make you is not free, of course, the price starts at $4,900. If you think about, it is not so much.

If you worked with companies and freelancers to get yourself some great websites, you probably know the prices.

And $4,900 is not a high price at all, especially taking into consideration that WordPress.com will create it for you. The company Automattic created WordPress and tens of other projects – tumblr, WooCommerce, Gravatar, Akismet, Jetpack, and many others.

Working with professionals is very different than working with all kind of freelancers and companies.

Don’t get me wrong, there are very nice freelancers out there and serious companies, but you need to know how to find them. If not, your project will be handled by people that just want your money.

It happened to me, here is a short story.

The story of working with a freelancer for my new website

I needed a professional website for my agency and knowing all the advantages of Webflow, I decided that the website will be on this platform.

So, I started to search a good company or freelancer for this project. First, I asked a couple of friends that have huge businesses in the online, if they can recommend me a serious and professional person or company.

They said no, they worked with lots of companies and people, and they were never happy with the results.

So, I decided to give it a try on Upwork.

Long story short, I hired a person from Upwork, a guy with tens of 5 starts review. Everybody was saying that this person is awesome, that he is very serious, that he overdelivers, that his website creation is magic, and so on.

I told myself that everything will be perfect with him.

But it wasn’t perfect

After he took my project and started working, he told me that I need to increase the budget 20% to work with him. I said ok, the guy is awesome.

In just a few words, the whole collaboration was a nightmare. He needed 3 months to finish my simple agency website, even if I always quickly provided him all the materials, content, and answers for his questions.

He asked me tens of questions and he put me complete several pages of business projections and in the end, he used nothing.

The guy wanted just to be a professional and tax me for all kind of things.

He managed to create me a super basic website that is not bad looking but for $4,000, I would have expected much more.

If the WordPress.com custom website service would have been available 1 year ago, I would gladly have paid them $4,900. I am absolutely sure that the result would have been 10 times better.

Let’s find out more about this service.

Everything we know about WordPress.com custom website service

Here is what we know about this service.

• It is named “Built by WordPress.com”.

• The service will create you a professional and custom website.

• Prices start at $4,900.

• There are 3 different plans:

Online Stores

Education Sites

Professional Services

• You will work with a dedicated manager throughout the duration of a project. He will make sure that your vision comes to life in the form you want.

• The service is just starting so the space is currently limited. Submit your application asap.

The implications of Built by WordPress.com custom website service

There are some strong implications of this new service.

WordPress.com will take a big bite of freelancers and companies market share. Many customers will probably prefer to work with WordPress.com, so other companies and people will lose good business.

I bet that many people are not so happy with this move.

Conclusions

It is awesome to work directly with the team behind WordPress for a fully customized website.

My next website will be created with the Built by WordPress.com service and I will share with you my thoughts. It will be a full article about how the projects worked with them.

Stay tuned. 

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