Thursday, March 28, 2024

Top Website Builders for Web Developers

In the early days of the World-Wide-Web, individuals and companies alike depended on web designers and developers to create their websites. These skilled crafts men and women harnessed the power of HTML and JavaScript magic that was considered to be impenetrable to the layperson. Now, thanks to online website generation tools such as SILEX, Weebly, and Wix, even your grandmother can design awe-inspiring web pages. In today’s follow-up to the Revolutionary HTML5 Online Website Generation Tools: SILEX, Weebly, and Wix article, we’ll examine a few more popular online website generation tools (a.k.a. website builders), namely Website Builder, Simbla, and SiteKreator.

Website Builder

websitebuilder (83K)

The aptly named WebsiteBuilder.com site was launched in 2014, and has been steadily improving ever since. Getting started with WebsiteBuilder.com is simple: you just click the big orange “Start Your Website” button on the home page, and then provide your name, email address, and password.

The next step is choosing your website template. WebsiteBuilder.com offers a lot of templates, to say the least — more than 10,000. There’s a ready-made template for every niche and style, but it’s not a case of quantity over quality. In fact, Website Builder prides themselves on having the best template designs in the industry.

The next (and final) stop is the editor dashboard. Design and customization options are spread across the top navigation bar and sidebar. There are plenty of modules to choose from, including images, galleries, text, icons, buttons, shapes, social buttons, eCommerce, documents, and more. The drag-and-drop interface makes all of the modules extremely easy to position on the page.

Within the dashboard, you can switch between the desktop and mobile editor using buttons on the top navigation bar. The mobile editor allows you to preview your website as it appears on smartphone devices. You can use this editor to directly edit the appearance, just as you can for desktops. New options are made available in the mobile view editor, some of which enable you to hide elements, adjust padding, alignments, etc. It’s a great way to make your website responsive.

Website Builder has made owning a domain and website quite easy by creating a one click publish system. Once live, you can still edit your website then update it with one button click. Features like that have made this website builder tool one of the easiest in the industry to launch a website.

There are several subscription options ranging from the free hosting-only package to $11.99 per month.

Simbla

simbla (25K)

Here’s a tool that integrates a Responsive Website Builder, Application Builder, and App Market into one unified business environment. Upon founding the company in Tel Aviv in 2013, Ilan Zrien and Shlomi Stein Zrien set out to make website creation simple, quick, and fun. With that goal in mind, they designed their platform so that anybody can create a professional and attractive website in under 20 minutes without any coding knowledge. Simbla further separated itself from the pack by being exceptionally accessible and user-friendly.

The platform emphasizes optimization across devices. Bootstrap 3 is employed to automatically optimize any created website for any platform, from mobile, laptop, to tablet.

Simbla recently rolled out its advanced database and web application builder features, thus making it a uniquely attractive website builder for those with web development experience.

SEO-friendliness and investment in advanced information security are both priorities in Simbla, which should provide some comfort to users, given the number of hacking incidents being reported these days.

Pricing ranges from free to $48 per month. The paid plans offer you more storage and bandwidth than the free plan does, as well as the ability to assign your own domain and database access. If you do opt for a paid subscription, Simbla offers a 14-day money back guarantee.

SiteKreator

sitekreator (61K)

You might think that online website builders are a relatively new phenomenon. While basically true, here’s one that’s been soldering on since 2006! In that time, it has garnered over 100,000 users — no small feat!

Design customizations are divided into 5 categories; Colors, Fonts (Main), Fonts (Titles), Site Background and Site Background Ornaments. The Premium and Deluxe packages offer a little something extra: access to the SiteKreator Pro Style and Layout editors. These two editors let designers create websites from the ground up without touching a single line of code.

SiteKreator has a number of standard types of content to choose from, including Text and Image, Image Gallery, File Area, Forums and Blogs, and Mailing List Forms, among others. Once added to the page, each content type shows a tiny blue icon in the top left corner of its content box whenever you mouse-over the element. The icon gives access to a menu that lets you edit the element’s content.

In addition to the content types above, SiteKreator lets you add what it calls applications (what others would call widgets). These are called applications because they let you add functionality to your site. At the moment, only a few applications are available, but those released so far show great potential. The company has even released an SDK that allows programmers to develop their own applications.

Take it from someone who has developed bilingual (English and French) web apps for more than 15 years, multilingual sites tend to be a challenge to build and manage. Apart from having to deal with keeping page content synchronized, there’s the additional burden of keeping links between pages in the different languages intact. A user should be able to switch to a different language from any page on your site without breaking navigation.

Only a few website builders provide tools to aid with Internationalization and localization. That list was expanded by one on January 11, when SiteKreator released its Language Selector application. Built on SiteKreator’s own application platform, the new tools lets website owners set up and manage up to 6 additional languages for their site. Different language versions of a site can be hosted either on different domains or on sub-domains of a single domain. Website administrators can define what languages are offered and link individual pages in the different languages. This allows them to have different (SEO optimized) URLs for each of pages in all languages.

SiteKreator offers several pricing option from $9.95 to $59.95 per month with discounts for paying annually (20%) and biennially (30%).

Conclusion

There are many other excellent website builders in addition to those mentioned here today. In their Best Free Website Builders Review of 2017 reviews, beautifullife.info suggests a number free website builders.

Rob Gravelle
Rob Gravelle
Rob Gravelle resides in Ottawa, Canada, and has been an IT guru for over 20 years. In that time, Rob has built systems for intelligence-related organizations such as Canada Border Services and various commercial businesses. In his spare time, Rob has become an accomplished music artist with several CDs and digital releases to his credit.

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