What is the best online website builder?
There are many tools for building your own web site. Perhaps the easiest way
is to use free online sitebuilder. But which one does the best job for me? Well,
it really depends.
Users can opt for traditional brand names: Google
Page Creator or Microsoft Office Live.
They might also give a try to specialized web services. We have tested out the
following sitebuilders:
- FreeWebs.com - have been on the market
since 2001, initially as a hosting service, and attracted far the most users
- Weebly.com - YCombinator backed startup
with a promising growth, they have doubled since February 2008
- Synthasite.com - originally coming
from South Africa, a little controversial company due to a stock give-away
offer
- Webnode.com - Europe based startup
with a relatively high ratio of small business customers
The list does not represent a comprehensive market overview. It is rather a
comparison of four providers outlining interesting facts that might be useful
for end-users.
| sitebuilder |
FreeWebs.com |
Weebly.com |
Synthasite.com |
Webnode.com |
| registered users |
20 000 000 |
600 000 |
150 000 |
65 000 |
| monthly page views |
270 000 000 |
20 000 000 |
3 000 000 |
8 000 000 |
| page views / registered users |
14 |
33 |
20 |
123 |
| Based on recent Alexa and Compete data |
FreeWebs is taking the advantage of being the longest time on the market compared
to the other competitors. In terms of both the number of registered users and
the web site traffic (page views) the other competitors fall behind significantly.
It is also worth of noting that, unlike other competitors, FreeWebs displays
ads on unpaid web sites.
On the other hand the above mentioned parameters do not say much about the sitebuilder
quality and features. When investigating the web services we focused on two
key characteristics:
- Ease of use
- Efficiency of content creation
All the sitebuilders deliver drag-and-drop functionality when editing the web
site. Moreover FreeWebs, Weebly and Synthasite offer inline text editing that
is especially suitable for beginners. The price users pay for this ease of use
is the fact that every web page has to be created from the scratch which is
a quite time-consuming process. The overall efficiency of content creation is
then rather low. Typical web sites usually contain just a few web pages.
If users want to add a custom dynamic and structured content (e.g. articles),
Webnode sitebuilder is offering such functionality. Users can design their own
data templates. The process is very similar to the database table design in
Microsoft Access. This way users work more efficiently as they are able to build
more content in less time. The drawback of this feature is that the user always
has to switch to admin mode to edit the text.
Above mentioned conclusions are very well described by the following chart.
It shows the number of monthly page views of the content that a single registered
user has created with the particular sitebuilder. While users of FreeWebs, Weebly
and Synthasite have generated in average 14, respectively 33 and 20 page views
per month, Webnode users have reached more than 120 page views in a month. This
proves a significantly higher efficiency of content creation despite a slightly
user-unfriendly text editing compared to the remaining sitebuilders.
It is clear the ease of use and the efficiency of content creation are exclusive
parameters. Thus the answer to the question what service is the best for me
really depends on concrete needs. Users should have on their minds as well the
fact there are always some limitations in web site design in comparison with
a custom layout. But hey, it is free and you do not need to pay any designer
or developer.