Weighing up the free website builders

[maxh]

Out of the following tools which would you say has been the best all round experience for building a website for free.

Webs
WiX
Weebly
Yola
Moonfruit

Taking into account things like

• How easy it is to build a site
• How free the tool really is
• Support
• Power of the site itself
• Ease of implementation
• Variety of designs and features
• Price to go pro/upgrade
• reliability
• continuous development

Many thanks, I've only used Weebly and G site builder, wonder how the others fare.

 

[Pocket Money Designs]

I recommend Moonfruit. I have been using it for nearly 5 years and it has developed immensely in that time. Some people tend to avoid it because its flash and not html. However Moonfruit index all of the sites using separate html data and allow you to customise things such as metadata etc so you can still get a decent position on the search engines. One site built using Moonfruit is in the top position on google for the search term "louise".

One downside of Moonfruit websites are that they don't display properly on mobile devices such as the iPhone. At the moment a separate mobile site is the only way around this, but I don't find it an issue at the moment.

I am just in the process of updating my moonfruit website. Have a look for an example www.pocketmoneydesigns.co.uk

In answer to your other points

How easy it is to build a site?
Very easy, they provide basic templates or you can create your own. There is a 'drag and drop' interface

How free the tool really is
Completely free if you display a small advert. Certain features such as ecommerce tools are only available to paying customers (as you would expect)

Support
Friendly forum, helpful staff

Power of the site itself
Easily enough for a small business. Paid upgrades offer extra bandwidth extra

Ease of implementation
Very easy, you could have a basic site up and running within a day!

Variety of designs and features
Large selection of templates to choose from and everything is customisable without the need to know html

Price to go pro/upgrade
Upgrade packages range from £22.99 to £123.99 a year great value

reliability
Weekly reports show 100% uptime consistently.

continuous development
the team work hard on developing the system

 

[maxh]

Cheers PMD, I did notice the load time was around 10-15 seconds for a full load (with a cleared cache) Is this something you're noticing in webmaster tools also?

 

[Pocket Money Designs]

Inevitably with flash its going to take longer to load the page on the first visit (remember the early days of flash with the annoying percentage % loading bars!?)

I stand by Moonfruit being great for a free website builder (incl free hosting) and for start-up and small businesses wanting a web presence. It's not going to compare to a custom built £2000 html website but for majority of users who have little or no html knowledge its perfect until the business has grown to the stage where they can afford to pay a web developer for a custom site.

 

[Experienced IT guy]

Interesting that you ommit SEO as one of your criteria for choosing a site builder / cms system. I'd ask why? Surely if you build the nicest site in the world, if none of the search engines can find it, index its pages in a search engine friendly manner and give them the desired weight for search terms, I feel you are largely misdirecting your efforts.

I'd put SEO compatability as 1. then all your other criteria as 2, 3....

For example a good site builder will prompt you for all the information that a web spider will expect to find before letting you publish the page.
For a second example: finding content by going to &page=123 is definely seach engine unfriendly. Finding content by going to mysite/garden/hoses/green.htm is search engine friendly.

If your learning - this page may help you get started for free. (people seem to think its worth 5 minutes of their time to read on average)
http://www.ava.co.uk/support/faq/si...eryone/free-seo-tools-to-get-you-started.aspx

 

[MASSEY]

I had a 50p bet with myself when i saw experienced it guy had replied to this thread he would have dropped his link to his free tools.

 

[cmcp]

I'd recommend going with Wordpress.com and mapping a domain to your account, then when you become comfortable with the setup have it exported to your own shared hosting account so you retain the domain, site and content from the beginning.

 

[Normansmith]

I had a 50p bet with myself when i saw experienced it guy had replied to this thread he would have dropped his link to his free tools.

Funny you said that i noticed that was his answer to everything !!!!!

 

[awebapart.com]

Out of the following tools which would you say has been the best all round experience for building a website for free.

For free, or for a very low price, I would add the following hosted website builders to that list:

1. Wordpress.com
2. Microsoft Office Live
3. Website builders from some of the hosting companies, e.g. Instant Site from 123-reg
4. GBBO (Get British Business Online with Google Sites)

How free the tool really is

One other thing to consider with free, is freedom of choice. Most sitebuilders are based on proprietary systems which make it difficult for you to move your site away from a service, so check exit strategies with different services.

The notable exceptions include wordpress.com which obviously use wordpress, but a customised version of wordpress, so to get something similar when moving away you would still have to apply those customisations to the default wordpress system.

The other notable exceptions are the sitebuilders used by some hosting companies. They might not be open source like wordpress, but some are white label versions of the same software (e.g. parallels sitebuilder), which does give you some freedom to move to another hosting company using the same system.

I noticed a music related website in your signature, so for music related sites I would also recommend looking at a myspace page, perhaps in addition to a normal website.

One other thing to consider with a lot of hosted website builders is the server location. A lot of the services are US-based, which isn't such an issue for .co.uk domains but might cause other issues if you have a .com domain (i.e. google thinking that you are US based, thus not ranking you so highly for searches in the UK).

A final consideration on exit strategies is what happens with domain names, if they are originally registered with the website builder service. I personally would recommend that you purchase the domain yourself from an established domain name registrar like 123-reg, and then point the domain at the website (e.g. by changing name servers or DNS records). Services like wordpress.com (at a small yearly charge) and Microsoft Office Live allow you to do this, so I'm guessing quite a few of the other services allow this too, if you look closely enough.

 

[Experienced IT guy]

I had a 50p bet with myself when i saw experienced it guy had replied to this thread he would have dropped his link to his free tools.

You would have won (I'm back from holiday). But as I point out:
a) They are not my free tools, but Google's, Yahoo etc. and this is an introduction to them. I have not seen the equivalent of this anywhere else.
b) People spend about 5 mins on the page (and return)
c) I get thanked 20% of the time, which is a lot better than the average around here.
d) We do not offer SEO services, so all I gain from it is a warm feeling that I am helping people get to understand SEO.
e) Those that do can make a good value judgement on SEO services offered by other members and so benefit the experienced and talented SEO experts here.

So it is not "link dropping" which has negative connotations, rather it is a direction to a resource which I have spent a moderate amount of time putting together for the benefit of others. They do appear to benefit. Thank me if you like.

 

[havana]

Now I know this builder is not on the list, but I reckon it's worth a mention. Cubender is a Flash website builder and it's pretty damn good IMHO! I had a few issues learning to use the editor (as expected) but the support was relatively fast, within a day replies at max. I have the pro package at $29.95 a month so I guess it's not the cheapest on the market but it looks really good and i'm happy with my site. It has a free trial (Just to fill in some of the criteria for this thread).