Web site builders are online tools which anyone can use to build a professional looking Web site and have it hosted instantly. No software to buy, no code to learn, all you need is to be a little Internet savvy and know how to click your mouse.
If you're a pro, Web site builders will save you weeks of work and allow you (or your clients) to easily maintain the site.
The reviewed products are the current leaders in their fields and are arranged in order of capabilities - from an extremely easy-to-use online Web site builder for creating small sites to comprehensive business Web site builder.
If you're new to site building and just want to try it for free, you can use the first four products as free Web site builders - in addition to paid services, they enable you to create a Web site for free with some limitations.
They give you a chance to test your netwriting skills for free. You can cancel the project at any time if something goes wrong, or switch to a paid version if you are totally delighted with the result and want to remove restrictions and include additional features.
1&1 Website Builder
This is a popular Web site builder, which anyone can use to quickly create small sites without the need of HTML programming skills or expensive desktop software. It's suitable for those who just want to make small professional looking Web sites very quickly, easily and inexpensively - affiliates, home and small businesses, families, hobbies, sports teams, etc.
It's free when you buy a domain name at 1&1 ($6.99/year) and lets you create a 5-page website. If you need more pages you have to buy a hosting package (from $3.99/month).
Building a Web site is a five-step process...
- Choose your layout from a library of 120 website templates.
- Refine your design - choose your favorite graphic and pick the font size, text color, and navigation button style.
- Edit your content with easy to use online editor.
- Add extra features like Flash animation, a counter, feedback forms, guest books and more.
- Publish your Web site.
In comparison to other online Web site builders the main advantage of 1&1 Website Builder is its price. The main disadvantage is less options when customizing your template and page layout.
1&1 also offers cheap domain registration and a wide variety of hosting plans.
Office Live Small Business
It provides everything you need to grow small business online. You can create a professional online presence including domain name, hosting, design tools, site traffic reports, and more. All you need is a computer and an Internet connection.
The basic account is free (it's ad supported). You get 500 MB of storage, a good online WYSIWYG Web site builder, a custom domain name, and up to 100 business email accounts. You can also upload existing pages from your hard drive.
If you register your domain name through Office Live Small Business, it's free for the first year and $14.95/year thereafter. You can also redirect your existing domain name from a different domain registrar.
The advanced features are available for a fee...
- E-Commerce - a full featured shopping cart and accepting credit card payments.
- E-Mail Marketing - mailing lists, sending newsletters and promotions.
- Search Marketing - advertising your business on popular search engines.
- More email accounts, storage, additional domain names.
Site2you
This tool takes a different approach to site creating than other free Web site builders - one time fee package. You can make a complete site with unlimited pages for one flat fee.
First of all, you get a 7-day free trial account and can create a Web site for free. After switching to the registered account, you get two weeks of access to your site as you develop it. You can make the unlimited quantity of downloads or direct file transfers to your hosting company servers.
They won't delete your Web site from their base after you have finished it. If you need to make further changes to it, you can either do them yourself or use their 10-day or 1-month access plan (for a small fee) to make updates and download or transfer your site again.
They offer a powerful online editor and hundreds of high-quality professional Web site templates to choose from. (Site2you partners with TemplateMonster - one of the world's leading Web site templates providers.)
Click here to try the Site2you Web site builder for free.
Website Wizard
This service differs from simple Web site builders - it's rather a small business platform for those who want to make money online but don't have the time or can't afford to buy all the needed products and services.
This is an all-in-one ecommerce package of tools that takes care of everything for you, from domain name registration, graphic design and hosting, to search engine submission, traffic analysis and ezine publishing.
New: Now you can create a simple site for free, using a small subset of Website Wizard features. After building your site, you'll get a free 7-day account.
Here's what you get...
- Free domain name registration.
- Unlimited storage space.
- Unlimited email accounts and aliases.
- WYSIWYG site builder interface, professional-looking templates and color schemes, a huge bank of graphics and photos.
- Creating entry and exit pop-ups and pop-unders.
- Building a professional-looking logo in just a few mouse clicks.
- Your own mailing list for publishing an ezine and even personalizing your emails.
- Ezine Generator for creating and sending your email newsletters.
- Search engine submission.
- Automatic link exchange.
- Credit card processing.
- Taking online orders and distributing your e-products, such as e-books, manuals, newsletters, etc.
Site Studio
Unlike other reviewed Web site builders, this browser-based solution for site design and construction from Positive Software Corporation isn't a standalone tool. It's a software that hosting providers can install on their servers to help users build professionally looking sites without knowing anything about FTP, HTML, or imaging software.
Key features of Site Studio:
- Simple to use: Site Studio guides you step-by-step, providing simple choices regarding color, style and images. There is no software to buy, and no code to learn.
- Layout templates: Site Studio provides over 1000 professionally designed templates. The content of your site is stored separately from the layout. You can completely change the look and feel of your site in a few clicks of the mouse, without ever having to retype any information.
- Customizable color schemes: Site Studio includes a number of built-in color combinations that look great with any layout. All the colors can be changed, either by using a point-and-click color picker, or typing in the color as a hex number.
- Complete control over images: you can upload your own images without having to leave your browser. The required images, including logos, rollover buttons and sidebars, can also be generated automatically in the colors you want, with the desired text.
- Variety of pages: Site Studio includes a lot of predefined page templates: About, Links, Download, Firm Profile, Survey Form, FAQ, Catalog, ICQ Contact Center, Site Map, Contact Us, Services, Add-A-Cart Catalog, Amazon Web Store, etc. Generic Page template enables creation of custom pages that do not fall into any other categories. Advanced users can copy-paste existing HTML pages and create Web pages based on their own HTML code.
- One-click publishing: The site is published with one click. But even after publishing, you can go back and change it as much as you wish.
Many hosting providers offer this Web site builder for an additional fee. However, here is an inexpensive hosting service which provides clients with Site Studio for free...
- IXWebHosting
Unlimited disk space and bandwidth for $5.95 a month. Additionally, you get a unique (dedicated) IP address for your site.
See Inexpensive Web Hosting for more details about this hosting provider.
Site Build It
In fact, it's more than other Web site builders - it's a comprehensive BUSINESS Web site builder. Site Build It provides a complete, all-in-one Web hosting system of tools that makes it quick and easy for anyone (from savvy pro to complete newbie) to build a professional, popular, and profitable Web BUSINESS (and not just a Web SITE). You won't find any other Web site builder that can show results like this.
Site Build It takes care of all the technology and complexity of building and marketing your ecommerce site (domain name, hosting, graphic design, search engine submission and optimization, traffic analysis, e-zine publishing, etc.) and allows you to jump straight to the money making side of your Web business.
Click here to see the complete list of features.
(It's too long to be placed here and is updated too often - new modules and features are
added every month, at no extra charge).
SBI Video Tour is a set of videos that can show you more details of SBI package. Also, if you need more information to decide whether SBI is right for you, see Home: Articles: Easy website building tool.
If you buy, from a variety of different vendors, all the functionality that SBI offers in a single package, it will cost you thousands of dollars a year, and you'll still be missing unique SBI functionality.
For example, here's how SBI struggles for traffic from the free search engines - the most valuable traffic because it's free and produces interested and willing to buy visitors...
- SBI's Brainstorming tool helps you find highly profitable topics for your site (reduces hours of manual research to mere clicks.)
- Before you even build each page, as well as after each one is ranked, SBI tells you exactly what to do to rank higher at the search engines.
- WorldSubmitter submits pages to all the major search engines without violating any of the search engines' protocols: it doesn't submit more than one page of a site to each engine in any 25 hour period and it doesn't submit the same page twice in a 30 day period.
- SpiderWatcher tracks the major search engines' spiders. It knows what the spiders look like (the spider-tracking database is updated every 6 hours). If within a certain number of days no crawler has visited, SpiderWatcher "alerts" WorldSubmitter to re-submit the site to the search engines that ignored the initial submission.
- ListChecker checks the engines periodically to make sure the site has made it into the index and after that keeps tabs on it to make sure it's still there. Should that page disappear from a search engine's index, ListChecker will tell WorldSubmitter to re-submit it.
So it's no wonder that SBIers quickly grab the top spots in search results and earn thousands of dollars per month from free traffic:
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All this submission and re-submission works automatically, without you having to lift a finger, and not only makes SBI unique among other ecommerce Web site builders, but is the first tool of its kind on the Net. Although Site Build It can do a lot more, this particular feature impresses me the most.
SBI is constantly tuned to minimize your time and maximize your results. No need for you to read about Net marketing in an endless attempt to "stay up to date". All you need is to follow the simple, step-by-step process through a system of tools that handles all the technology and complexity. And in case you've no time to do it yourself, you can hire a specialist with a history of SBI success from SiteSell Services to build a successful Web site for you.
Ken Evoy, the owner of this small business Web site builder, is so confident about high quality of his product that offers unlimited money-back guarantee - and even one better...
If at any point in time SBI does not exceed your expectations, he'll not only refund you immediately, but you can keep the domain name that you registered (it's included in the price, when you purchase SBI).
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