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What are the differences in using platforms like Wix or Go Daddy website builders versus coding a website in terms of what we see in the end product as the website? Which is the better option and what are the advantages/disadvantages of one method over the other?
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Ted’s Answer
Tools like Wix and GoDaddy's website builder are optimized for letting non-designers put up a website. They are highly simplified to remove the complexity from web development, so eventually you will outgrow them if you want to customize your site.
The Wordpress platform powers over 25% of the pages on the entire Internet. This means that everything you've ever seen a website do, **it can do**. In my experience Wordpress provides a fairly gentle learning curve up from the layperson who just wants a landing page for their business up through legit, marketable web development skills. I went from starting a free blog on Wordpress.com with no web design skills, to ultimately migrating my site to a self-hosted Wordpress.org site where I could customize the themes and plugins to add new functionality to my site. This taught me a lot about administering content management systems that I later used in my career as a learning designer for online education.
In other words, the tools you mentioned are great if you need a website online tomorrow and you want to just choose a template and fill it in with your content. But if you want to build a website that will grow with you and support whatever you might choose to do in the future, building some skills in Wordpress will really set you off in the right direction for your career.
Check out Wordpress.com to set up a free blog.
If you have hosting at GoDaddy or something like it, try installing Wordpress open source software on your server and giving it a whirl.
Live happily ever after and be awesome.
The Wordpress platform powers over 25% of the pages on the entire Internet. This means that everything you've ever seen a website do, **it can do**. In my experience Wordpress provides a fairly gentle learning curve up from the layperson who just wants a landing page for their business up through legit, marketable web development skills. I went from starting a free blog on Wordpress.com with no web design skills, to ultimately migrating my site to a self-hosted Wordpress.org site where I could customize the themes and plugins to add new functionality to my site. This taught me a lot about administering content management systems that I later used in my career as a learning designer for online education.
In other words, the tools you mentioned are great if you need a website online tomorrow and you want to just choose a template and fill it in with your content. But if you want to build a website that will grow with you and support whatever you might choose to do in the future, building some skills in Wordpress will really set you off in the right direction for your career.
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Updated
Dexter’s Answer
Hi Paridhi,
To answer your question directly, it really depends on what you want to do with your website, and who the users of the website are. As Ted answered, Wix and GoDaddy are platforms that have simplified website creation by limiting things. It may totally may meet your needs, and in that case, it'll work great. Anytime you get to a point where it won't do what you want to exactly in the way you want it done, you're going to need to either create your own site or move to another platform, like wordpress.
It sounds like from your tags that this is a decision for a nonprofit. My advice would be to have a nonprofit sign up on catchafire.org for a 1 hr consultation with a web developer, so you can talk through all the needs of the nonprofit and get advice on what platform would work best for you. Personally, with lots of nonprofits, there is a rotating pool of volunteers that will need to work on this website with varying degrees of web development skills. Given this reality, I would stick to using a well understood tool, such as wordpress, Wix, etc instead of coding something totally custom. I've helped way too many nonprofits with a custom website that no one wants to modify, so they have to rebuild the site from scratch after a volunteer leaves the organization.
I wish you the best!
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Dexter
To answer your question directly, it really depends on what you want to do with your website, and who the users of the website are. As Ted answered, Wix and GoDaddy are platforms that have simplified website creation by limiting things. It may totally may meet your needs, and in that case, it'll work great. Anytime you get to a point where it won't do what you want to exactly in the way you want it done, you're going to need to either create your own site or move to another platform, like wordpress.
It sounds like from your tags that this is a decision for a nonprofit. My advice would be to have a nonprofit sign up on catchafire.org for a 1 hr consultation with a web developer, so you can talk through all the needs of the nonprofit and get advice on what platform would work best for you. Personally, with lots of nonprofits, there is a rotating pool of volunteers that will need to work on this website with varying degrees of web development skills. Given this reality, I would stick to using a well understood tool, such as wordpress, Wix, etc instead of coding something totally custom. I've helped way too many nonprofits with a custom website that no one wants to modify, so they have to rebuild the site from scratch after a volunteer leaves the organization.
I wish you the best!
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Dexter
Updated
Angel’s Answer
I agree with Ted and Dexter.
I would emphasize on the idea that starting on website builders is the way to go given that those would cover most of the common use cases.
Having said that, I would like to mention 2 use cases that may be fit for a custom development:
- The business is about the website: The website is not only to publish content about the company, but are actually the products and services that the company offers and delivers online. Eg. Google, Facebook, etc. or any other company big or small in which their business model is based on the user experience interacting with the website.
- The design and/or brand is so special and unique: Nowadays, builders offers tons of design options and templates (some of them are free!) that you can configure and fine tune with the colors and images of your brand, but there might be specific cases where you need to start from a "blank canvas" and do a custom design.
I would emphasize on the idea that starting on website builders is the way to go given that those would cover most of the common use cases.
Having said that, I would like to mention 2 use cases that may be fit for a custom development:
- The business is about the website: The website is not only to publish content about the company, but are actually the products and services that the company offers and delivers online. Eg. Google, Facebook, etc. or any other company big or small in which their business model is based on the user experience interacting with the website.
- The design and/or brand is so special and unique: Nowadays, builders offers tons of design options and templates (some of them are free!) that you can configure and fine tune with the colors and images of your brand, but there might be specific cases where you need to start from a "blank canvas" and do a custom design.