In the early days of the Internet, if you wanted to make a website, you need to know how to program one yourself using HTML. Through the years, building websites became even more complicated, using additional programming languages like PHP, cascading style sheets (CSS), JavaScript, and more.
Fortunately, there were also tools known as website builders that came along, which allow people to create beautiful websites without any programming knowledge. If you need a website, read this page to help determine if it makes more sense for you to code your own site or to use a website builder.
Key takeaways:
- Coding your own website can be challenging, but also rewarding. With custom coding, you can create unique features and effects that cannot be found anywhere else on the web.
- Website builders are an ideal choice for most types of sites, and they make it easy to not only create your site but also manage it long-term.
- In some cases, you can use a website builder to create your site and then use your own custom code to add specific features that you need.
Benefits of Coding Your Website
These benefits of coding your website may make it worth it to you:
- Fully customizable: You can customize every aspect of the site to make it look and function exactly the way you want. This isn’t possible with website builders.
- Efficient: Coding your site means that you’re able to build in the features you want, but also that you can leave out all the features you don’t need. This means your code is much more efficient. When done properly, this can result in significantly faster load speeds for your page.
- Fun experience: If you’re a programmer, you likely love the creativity involved with this type of project. For many people, coding their own website is a lot of fun.
Programming your website is a great option for those who know the necessary programming languages. In addition to being able to build a custom site that’s nothing like any other pages out on the Internet, it can also be a very rewarding process. You can either code your own website yourself or hire a programmer to bring your ideas to life on your site.
Benefits of Using a Website Builder
Modern website builders have a ton of great features that can allow you to make some truly incredible sites. Some of the biggest benefits of using a website builder include:
- Simplicity: Website builders are generally very easy to use, especially when compared to coding the site yourself. You can drag and drop the features you want on your site so that it looks and runs great.
- Fast: Anyone can build a great site using a website builder faster than an experienced programmer could code a similar site from scratch. Website builders make it possible to create a great site in hours or minutes, depending on what features you need.
- Expandable: Sites built with a website builder are designed to allow you to add new pages or other things that are needed to grow your site. Depending on how you code your page by hand, it might need fresh code for each page.
- Affordable: There are website builder services and tools out there to meet any budget. You can even find free website builders that can produce some surprisingly advanced sites.
If you’re looking for the easiest way to build a website, using a website builder is the way to go. There are many great tools and services out there that let you build a great site without any coding experience at all.
Website builders have been around for a long time. While in the early days the sites that were made were quite basic, that isn’t the case today.
Using a Hybrid Approach to Building Your Website
One thing to keep in mind is that there’s no need to go fully in one direction or the other when trying to decide whether you should code your own site or use a website builder. Many people use a hybrid approach.
This approach is where you use the website builder tools to create the main structure of the site, and then code certain features or pages manually in a way that isn’t possible with the website builder.
Using this hybrid approach gives you the best of both worlds. Many website builders allow you to use plug-ins or add-ons for additional features. If that’s the case with the builder that you’re using, you could code your plug-ins, for example, to get the functionality you need.
How To Decide Which Is Right for Your Small Business
When creating a website, you’ll need to decide whether to code it yourself or use a website builder or a hybrid option very early on in the process. If you have an experienced programmer on your team, it may make sense to have them create the site, but only in certain situations.
If, for example, you need some type of unique feature on your site that isn’t readily available with existing code. If that isn’t the case, you usually want to go with the faster and easier route, which is using a website builder.
The vast majority of websites today are made with some type of website builder or a premade content management system like WordPress. If you aren’t sure whether you want to code a site or not, the chances are that you would be much better off using a good website builder.
Best Website Builder Options
If you have decided to use a website builder, you need to make sure that you use the best one based on your specific needs. Take some time to read through our evaluation of some of the top-rated website builders available today. We spend hours using these tools and keep this page up and accurate all the time. If you prefer, you can also just pick one of these top three options based on our extensive research:
- Squarespace
- GoDaddy
- Leadpages
If you want to set up a basic blog-style website, which is more than enough for most small businesses, you could also opt to sign up for a good WordPress hosting service. This allows you to install WordPress in seconds and have your site up and running far more quickly than you would think possible.
What Should You Do Next?
Once you have decided whether you want to code your website manually or use a website builder, the next step is to get started. If you’re coding your site, you can create the page locally on your PC and then upload it to a web hosting server when it’s ready. If going that route, you can wait to sign up for a hosting account until the site is ready to go, but when it’s time, make sure you choose the best hosting services possible.
If you’re going to use a website builder, choose the one that’s best able to meet your needs. There are dozens of great website-building tools out there, so make sure to take the time to find the one that’s best suited for your type of site.
