What’s the best platform to build your next website with?
It’s one of the key factors the success or failure of your website in meeting your needs and driving your business forward.
If you Google it, you’ll end up wading through a wide variety of highly opinionated answers. Each person will have their opinion that “system X is THE best tool to build websites with, full stop”. The reality is that it’s much more nuanced than that.
One of the key issues is the many different platforms and tools you can choose are all quite unique in their capabilities and who they are aimed at.
Let’s look at the different options.
All-in-one website design services (web building + hosting) like Squarespace
These include Services like:
- Squarespace
- Wix
- Webflow
- Shopify
These services provide online website building tools with integrated hosting. A one stop shop. They are exclusively built and hosted by the companies behind them (therefore they are what we call proprietary systems). You should really think of these systems as full website services.
They provide the all the tools your need to build your site:
- Prebuilt website templates to get you started
- Drag and drop content editing
- Easy onboarding
- Website hosting you don’t need to manage
- Support teams that you can talk to if you get stuck
They generally have an easy learning curve for new users.
Some of these platforms, like Shopify, specialise in certain areas like online shops (e-commerce). Others like Squarespace aim to be the one stop shop for all your website needs.
One thing these services won’t provide is bespoke website design, if you want someone else to build your site on one of these platforms you’ll need to find a web developer who is skilled in the system you want to use.
All of these platforms will charge you a monthly fee to use the system. If you choose to stop paying this fee your website will stop working and you don’t have the option to move the website to other providers without quite a lot of manual work. Usually moving to another provider will require a complete website redesign.
Pros
- Easy learning curve
- One provider for one fee
- Good range of templates to choose from as a starting point
- Provide support as part of your monthly fees
Cons
- Easy to outgrow when you need more functionality
- Often not easy with repeatable content that requires structured data.
- Can get expensive if your needs are complex.
- Hard to export your content or data depending on your platform of choice
- Can’t host them elsewhere
Free,”open source” website design tools like WordPress
Some examples:
- WordPress
- Drupal
- Joomla
These tools are often referred to as a content management system (CMS). A CMS is software that runs on a web server and allows you to build your website and manage the content on that site.
They provide:
- Free platform to run your website
- Easy content editing
- Prebuilt templates (through third party themes)
- Extensive and flexible functionality (through plugins)
You (or an agency you are working with) will need to provide:
- Design
- Website content
- Website hosting
“Open source” means that the platform is maintained and developed by a community of people and the source code (the underlying code that runs these platforms) is in the public domain and can be used or extended by anyone within the terms of it’s open source licence. You do not need to pay to use the core platform code.
You will need to host the CMS somewhere. These platforms can be hosted on a wide variety of hosts or even on your own server if you are technically inclined. We’d obviously recommend that you use a professional host and there are plenty of great managed hosting providers for WordPress for example. Hosts will charge you a monthly or annual fee.
Many of these platforms have large numbers of plugins or add-ons built to work with them. This is often referred to in the industry as the “ecosystem”. These are tools that extend the functionality of your site to provide capabilities like listing events or ecommerce. The core CMS is free but many of the best plugins require some commercial licensing to use and will cost you some money annually.
The plugin ecosystem for these tools is their biggest strength. WordPress has over 60,000 plugins and this means your site can do anything you need it to.
While you can absolutely setup a WordPress website on your own, these systems work best when you work with a web developer or agency that can guide you through the process and develop an outstanding website for your business.
Pros
- Can run any kind of website big or small, ecommerce or blog
- Hugely flexible. There are over 60,000 plugins for WordPress
- Easy to use when setup well
- Battle tested at large scales: WordPress currently powers 43% of the internet so lots of professionals know these platforms.
- Repeatable content is easy to manage
- Easy to migrate data in and out of
- Massive range of templates to choose from as a starting point
- Can host with a wide range of providers
Cons
- Can have a learning curve depending on how they are setup
- Often different design tools used as a layer on top of these systems with differing easy of use
- Need ongoing management of plugin updates and security
- Support can be split between your website designer and your hosting
Paid, “closed source” web design tools like Statamic
There are also a lot of website design platforms (CMSs) that are “closed source”. This means their code is proprietary and you have to pay a licence fee to use the system for your website.
Their capabilities and pitfalls are very similar to the open source website design tools above. The skill level of the person or team setting up the site initially will need to be higher than many of open source CMS’s mentioned above. They are very powerful but they are also a completely open book that require good knowledge to setup well.
These are also different from the “all-in-one” services mentioned above as you will definitely need a designer to help you build with them (unless you have a very skilled person/team in house). You will need to host your finished website with a quality hosting provider. Hosts will charge you a monthly or annual fee over an above your paid license for the platform.
Some good examples of these systems:
- CraftCMS
- Statamic
Pros
- Can run any kind of website big or small, ecommerce or blog
- Hugely flexible if you have development skills
- Very easy to use for editing content when setup well
- Battle tested at large scales: while not as big in market share these tools are popular with large sites.
- Great role/access management if you need to limit access to certain website users
- Repeatable content is easy to manage
- Easy enough to migrate data in and out of
- Can host with a wide range of providers
Cons
- More expensive to design / develop a greater amount of design / development work required is required initially.
- Can have a learning curve depending on how they are setup
- Often different design tools used as a layer on top of these systems with differing easy of use
- Need ongoing management of plugin updates and security
- Support can be split between your website designer and your hosting
So how on earth to I choose the right tool for my business website?
A better way to answer the question is to answer a few questions first about what your website goals are:
- Are you a early stage (or brand new) business?
- Do you think your website needs will grow/change significantly over time?
- Is your business an ecommerce online store?
- Do you need to manage a lot of “repeatable” content such as, projects, team members, directories, events or courses?
- Do you need to integrate your website with external systems?
- How skilled are you or your in-house team?
- Are there government or organisational requirements you need to comply with?
Let’s break down some of these questions further.
1. Are you a early stage or brand new business?
No?
Move on to question 2.
Yes?
OK, what’s your budget? I know this is a cold hard question upfront, but in reality you need to get the best bang for your marketing dollars to get your business off the ground.
- Less than $3000-$5000 -> try to “do it yourself” with Squarespace or Wix
- $3000-$5000 or more -> try and find a freelancer or agency to help you make sure you’re picking the right platform and structuring your website and content for success
Option 1. If you have enough skills within the business to do a basic site that will be “good enough” for now, then one of the proprietary platforms like Squarespace or Wix could be a great fit early on. Often “good enough” will get the business an online presence that works and save you money in the short term. You can use the money you save in the website design to spend on online advertising to draw in more customers or on marketing copywriters to make sure you products and services sell themselves well.
There’s also nothing stopping you from redesigning the website once your business is more established.
We’d recommend NOT using other tools in this phase of your business unless you are experienced in the web world, as they will require too much maintenance overtime and you’ll have other things to worry about whilst growing your business.
Option 2. Our recommendation is that if you want to work with someone, make sure you have enough budget to do a good job that actually delivers good results. A quality web developer should be able to listen to what your business needs and make recommendations about what platform would suit you and how to structure your content for success.
2. Will your website needs grow significantly overtime?
No?
Then our answer here the same as question 1.
Yes?
Ok, great. Have a good think about how quickly and in what ways will your needs evolve?
Many of the all-in-one platforms have limitations that are not an issue with early stage businesses but can be hard to get around for businesses looking to build more complex or interactive sites. If you’re going to be rapidly changing/evolving your site in the six months after you launch it then sometimes the all-in-one platforms will start hold you back.
For example we rebuilt a website for a local festival that ran into a limit of the number of pages in their all-in-one system and couldn’t list all the separate festival events that they had in their programme.
3. Is your business an ecommerce online store?
No?
Skip this step.
Yes?
One word, Shopify!
There are a lot of ecommerce systems out there. We manage ~20 ecommerce stores that run Woocommerce, a popular ecommerce plugin for WordPress. But for simplicity of product and store management you just can’t beat Shopify.
There are some very good reasons why you would choose other ecommerce options. However, if you’re doing this on your own or if you don’t have an agency with a track record in ecommerce steering you to another system for the right reasons, choose Shopify as your starting point.
4. Do you need to manage “repeatable” types of content such as lists of projects, team members, directory listings, events or courses?
No?
It’s very likely that you just need simple content layouts that don’t need to pull in updated data regularly. In this case any of the systems will work for you.
Yes?
All the systems support blogging. However, the all-in-one systems don’t handle repeatable content very well generally speaking. Key to this is the ability to setup a customised interface for managing all the data for these repeatable content types.
For example, you might want to manage 50 “team members”. In that case you’ll need to have special fields for “name”, “role”, “bio” and “image” so you can easily manage these entries. You need a system that will allow you to customise the data entry screen and then also the template for outputting these on the website in a consistently styled way. You also need the process to be automatic. Hit publish on the new team member and have it automatically publish in the right place on the site.
The all-in-one systems don’t do this very well and we’d recommend looking at either of the other options for these types of websites.
5. Do you need to integrate your website with any external systems?
No?
Great, that’s easy, pick the system you like the best, any of them will work for you.
Yes?
You’ll need to do some really solid research before picking the best platform. Often you should trial an integration with a website building tool before deciding that it is a good fit.
Many tools will say they have an integration with “service X”. However the devil is in the details and you really need to throughly test the integration to make sure it’s going to work for you before committing to an expensive site build (or an expensive rebuild if the first system doesn’t work as you intended).
You should be prepared to pay more. Integrations can be expensive. For example basic Shopify can be great but if you need many of it’s add-ons to get the site connected to all your other systems your monthly costs will increase significantly.
We’d strongly recommend having an expert alongside you to help with these kinds of integrations.
6. How skilled are you or your in-house team in web design, copy writing and site management?
Do you or anyone on your team have the skills and more importantly the time to dedicate to building a great website that really moves your business forward?
Whilst modern tools mean that you don’t need to code things by hand anymore there’s still a lot of skill required to make something that looks professional and drives results. Here are some key pieces of the puzzle you’ll need to have:
- Good design eye to convert your brand to a great looking online presence
- Grasp of responsive website design and how you site will work across different device sizes
- Solid copy writing skills, so you can write content that will convert visitors to customers
- A solid content plan that makes sure all visitors can find what they need in only a few clicks
- Search engine optimisation
If you (or one of your employees) do have the skill level to build something great, make sure you’re not alone. You’ll get busy and you need to put some thought into who is going to look after the site after that? Even if you or someone on your team is not a total beginner in the website design sphere, you can’t guarantee all employees will share your skill levels and attention to detail.
If you don’t think you’re covering all the bases then the best idea is to talk to a web design agency. In that instance let them guide you to the right platform to use for your specific needs.
Do you need to design, build and manage the entire website in-house or on your own?
If you answered yes to this question, then consider these followup questions:
- Is this a budget issue? I.e. you don’t have enough budget to engage a freelancer or an agency to help you design the perfect website?
- Is it a requirement that your organisation be in control of every aspect of your technology stack?
If it’s a budget issue then one of the proprietary systems could be a good fit for you. Squarespace, Wix and the like are designed to be easy to use for beginner users. They usually have good templates you can use as a starting point.
If it’s an organisational requirement then make sure that your in house team have the right skills to get you where you want to go. In this case the choice of platform should meet project requirements but should also match the in house skills available (and also be something that would be easy to recruit new employees to fill any capacity gaps). Sometimes getting some industry specific advice can steer your in house team in the right direction and avoid some painful headaches down the line.
7. Are there government or organisational requirements you need to comply with?
No?
Great, that’s easy, pick the system you like the best, any of them will work for you.
Yes?
Laws like GDPR in Europe have requirements about where data is hosted. Likewise some organisations have similar requirements and policies that need to be adhered to.
Be careful with any system that you can’t host if you need (or might need) to meet specific policy requirements. You have no control over access to data and systems you don’t control or can’t have a locally based hosting company confirm with you. Most of the all-in-one platforms give you no control over where the data is hosted or who from their company or subcontractors have access.
So what’s our platform of choice?
This is going to sound trite but… the right tool for the job is the one that will get it done right.
At Avoca Web Design, we use WordPress a lot and also Statamic for building websites. However, for plenty of small businesses the all-in-one tools are fantastic and all that’s required. In the end if you carefully consider what you need the site for the answer should become a lot clearer.
Need some strategic advice? We love talking website strategy and direction. We can help you make a great plan no matter what stage your business is in. Get in touch with us to find out more.