Making the Most of SiteBuilders

Site Builders, the free build-it-yourself website builders that are bundled with your hosting package, offer a cheap entree into the wonderful world of websites, but usually, you get what you pay for.



Unsophisticated Home Page

A savvy home page is not merely an introductory page, but rather a table of contents. It teases the content on the back pages and puts everything just a click away. Site builders typically offer a single pane without divisions. It is difficult to break up the page gracefully to offer a variety of featured content boxes, or sections.




Slower Loading

Styles, the data that determines the color and style of fonts, is usually coded inline in site builder pages, so it takes longer to load the content and the associated styles. With professional sites, the styles are kept separate in a style, or CSS, file, so no styles are repeated and loading time is reduced.



Dreadful Graphics

Sitebuilders typically offer low quality graphics that make your site appear unprofessional.



Workarounds

If you cannot create sections on your home page with divisions, have a short paragraph for each separate topic. Include a subtitle and small image for each topic. Keep the fancy styles to a minimum to keep the load time down and the look will be more consistent, too.



Using graphics professionally on a Site Builder site is dicey. The best looking sites have used the strategy of a solid background for the header with a professional looking logo. The logo should have transparent background matted with the background color. If you don't know what that means, consider working with a professional graphic artist to produce your logo.



The Best Site Builders

There are some site builders that work even for inexperienced users. The two best ones I know of are:

1. The iLife sitebuilder that comes free with the purchase of an Apple computer.

2. The SimplWeb Joomla site builder. This site builder offers support and great tutorials not found with other sitebuilders. It isn't free, but it includes hosting. Joomla is an excellent Content Management System so don't let the word scare you off. This is different from Jolly Mystic where we build the Joomla site and turn it over to you to update yourself. The difference in pricing is that you pay a little more upfront with us but then you're done. With SimplWeb you pay an ongoing monthly fee, a bit above normal hosting fees.