Website Creation Platforms

What platform are you going to be using frequently? What platform are you going to be using to create this website? The common ones that you're going to see are Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, and GoDaddy has a build it tonight type platform. I think just about any hosting company has its own, what you see, what you get, editor to build a website. So there are literally thousands of choices out there. Here's what you want to consider
when trying to figure out which one's going to work for you. All of these platforms take no coding information. You don't have to understand coding in order to create a site there. They're all on a what you see,
what you get builder type thing. So they'll have, like, click and drag elements. They'll have templates that are set and you just, fill in your information, swap out there, and put yours in. When you're looking at any of these different systems, you want to look at everything they offer
that your business is going to use. You want to make sure that it offers
what your business needs. What that means, do you need a secure website form that actually takes personal information? If you do, that's not a basic website form. You want to make sure that the platform offers a solution for a secure website form. So that would be if you're asking for credit card information. anything personal, like Social Security number,
just, anything like that. If you're going to offer products for sale. That you want to actually physically sell. Make sure that the system offers a shopping cart. Is that shopping cart adequate for what you need?
Are you doing virtual downloads instead of actually shipping a product?
Does it offer that virtual download? All of these little pieces actually matter. And the reason I say that is that I've seen this literally over the last 15 years hundreds of times where someone will start on a platform because they love how it looked. But when they get into the nitty-gritty
of how it works and what it can and can't do, they get frustrated because it may not be able to do exactly what you want it to do. And that's when they call someone like me that's going to have to go in and actually code something to get it to work right. You don't want that. You don't want to be put in the position where you have to hire someone that knows code in order to run your website because then you're trapped with that person forever. When that person disappears, and let me tell you, in my industry, this happens a lot. I get a lot of customers this way. Whoever they were working with is no longer reachable. They won't answer their phone.
They won't answer their emails. They just disappeared and they hold the key to their website. And it's like, what do I do? A lot of times, depending on how many keys they hold, you have to start over. You don't want that.
So you want to avoid that at all costs. When you're looking at the templates, which is like the style of what it looks like, most of these website companies offer a variety of different templates. You want to make sure that you pick one that has a template. I hate to use this word,
but exactly what you want. Because then you can just take that picture out, put your picture in. Take out this block of text, put your block of text in,
and it's fairly simple and straightforward. But what usually happens is that you want something very similar to this, but slightly different. You want it to act in a slightly different way. When you go in and try to make that template do that slightly different thing, that's when frustration again sets in. You can't do it because you're locked out. In a lot of these systems, you're actually locked out from manipulating the code at all, which means you can't even hire someone like me to do this for you because I’m unlocked out just like you are. That's the drawback to what you see, what you get type editors within this realm of building a website. A few other drawbacks, some of them won't let you put in SEO, which is Search Engine Optimization. They won't let you tweak things behind the scenes to get better rankings within the search engines. And, again, a lot of times I get customers that have completely built websites in this, but they're not ranking well, and they want to hire a company to go in, and help them rank well. Well, a lot of times the answer is simply you need a different platform. that's not as restrictive as the one that you chose. So choosing a platform is critical. I personally use WordPress. The reason for that is that it is an open-source platform. What that means is not restricted by any one company. There are tons of plugins that you can either use for free or you purchase and there are a lot of good reasons to purchase plugins that you can add to your site. A plugin does one thing. And that is, like, a contact form plugin only runs your contact form. You can have, a slider plugin if you want to have images rotating on your website. It only does that one thing.