Build Your Own Website with Blog Included
A Business Must Have a Website. Save Money by Creating One Yourself
Every business has to be online these days. And every business owner wants a nice looking website. So they tend to get one custom built. There are many local companies that do an excellent job. However, the process can be quite costly, and every time you want some little change made you have to fork out some more! If the web design company you're using is very busy you often have to wait days -- sometimes even weeks -- for them to get around to it These annoyances aside, there's also the ongoing feeling that your website is largely controlled by someone else. This on its own can be very frustrating, even quite stressful.
That's why I think that in many cases the best approach is to build, maintain and promote your website yourself. If you do this you will save yourself a lot of frustration -- not to mention money. You'll be able to make all the changes required as soon as you like. Being in control of the process, you'll also be able to tweak your pages to help with SEO, and monitor your progress directly. That's another big benefit.
Easier than You Might Think
Many people might find the idea of doing this quite daunting. They expect there to be lots of geeky technical skills you have to learn. And yes, that is the case if you want a truly visually unique, branded website built with a platform like Wordpress or Drupal. But it doesn't have to be like that at all.
This is because in the last several years some very user-friendly website building software has been created. As long as you find a good web hosting company with such "drag and drop" page builders included you can have a nice looking website up and running in next to no time.
Weebly, Yola and Site123
In my opinion, three of the best website hosting companies in this regard are Weebly, Yola and Site123. This site, for example, was built with Weebly. My blog about Perth uses Yola. All have free options, with no ads. And the upgraded memberships are very affordable. Many people find using these sites so easy to use they'll have a site up and running in a few hours.
Of course some businesses -- particularly larger ones -- need something that's highly customized. But many don't need anything super flash. Weebly, Yola and Site123 have a great range of templates that look sleek and are fast loading.
Best of all, they have blogging tools included. This is a real bonus, because a blog is a great way of improving the website's SEO, among other things.