How to Design Your Own Website With Limited Budget

Today, with a transitional shift in customer buying behavior—that now make extensive use of internet to look up things— it has become pivotal for business owners to have a full-fledged website.

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A website not only helps you display your products and services to online audience worldwide but also offers a competitive edge. In addition, you can share blogs, pictures and other such stuff with your friends or your targeted audience. A website makes your brand identifiable and becomes an effective tool for various digital marketing services, required to promote your business. So, now the question is how are you going to design your own website with your limited budget?

Free Website Building Platforms

Much to the respite of budding entrepreneurs and business owners, numerous free website builders available on the web can help you design your own website in minimal price possible.  When using a free online builder you don’t have to worry about web hosting, as you are given a free web hosting for your site. On an online website builder, you can create your website directly even without having any special skills. Moreover, the cost involved in the whole process is excessively low as compared to the fee paid to a professional website designer. By creating a website on your own, you will become an expert and can easily manage it in future without having to outsource it to anyone else. Here is a list of top 5 free website builders, you can choose a one as per your need. These online platforms are easy to use and available to everyone.

Web Start Today

Web Start Today is a SEO-friendly & free responsive website builder tool with several additional features, including SEO tools, web hosting and live tech support. It offers an easy-to-use and intuitive interface especially designed for non-technical users.

Price: Start plan is free; other plans from $9.99/month.

Create a Free Site

Weebly

Weebly is a feature rich & helpful website builder and it is one of the best drag and drop website builders in the market today.

Weebly is a very user friendly, robust and a reliable website builder. It is a perfect tool for anybody who is looking to build a website to showcase your services, hobbies or interests.

Wix Highlights

• Easiest drag & drop website builder to use
• Good looking templates designed by professional
• Ecommerce tools that are fully integrated into the website builder

Price: Start plan is free; other plans from $4.00/month.

Create a Free Site

Wix - Create Your Stunning Website

Wix is a free site builder for building beautiful websites. It is easy really to use and provide you with the best looking themes amongst most WYSIWYG website builders.

Wix Highlights

• Hundreds of beautiful & professional templates for different industries
• Pure drag & drop website builder
• Comprehensive support – email, phone, knowledgebase help center, forum support

Price: Wix gives 100s of templates, unlimited pages & top grade hosting free; premium plans from $4.08/month.

Create a Free Site Premium Plans

GoDaddy - Website Builder

The GoDaddy website builder is a reliable website builder with customizable designs. The current version of the GoDaddy website builder is version 7 (v7). The v7 website editor is a blank canvas editor, which means that you can drag any element to any spot on the page. Also the new version of the editor has a wide selection of solid themes in v7 across a variety of categories.

GoDaddy Highlights

• Easy to Use with Professional Design Themes
• 24/7/365 Phone, Live Chat and Email Support
• Create Backup Points & Restore Function

Price: Plans start from $1.00/month.

Create a Site

Squarespace

Squarespace was launched in 2004 and is a drag and drop website builder specifically focused on providing rich-imagery, highly polished / finished experiences for website builders.

Squarespace is ease-of-use and offers a lot of beautiful templates. It’s best suited for small businesses, blogs, portfolios and ecommerce type sites.

Squarespace Highlights

• Visually pleasing, mobile responsive template designs
• Powerful & flexible styling editor
• 24/7 support

Price: Free 14-day trial; than plans that start from $8.00/month.

Create a Site Pricing

Choosing an Optimum Service Provider

If you are sold to the idea of creating a free website, you must make sure that you make use of a credible builder. Select a website builder that is simple to use and operate. In addition, provides you ample template choices and free images that enable you to design your own website instantly. There are providers that allow users to download program to their computers, and there are some that can be accessed only online. Whichever type you choose, make sure that the website builder provide you with tutorials or a user manual, so that you don’t waste time figuring out things.

Responsive Designing

With world moving towards mobile computing, it is likely that majority of your customers are making use of mobile phones and tablets to access internet. In order to cater to your mobile savvy audience, you need to choose the responsive design and make your site mobile and tablet friendly. Make sure that the builder you choose provide responsive designing.

Engaging SEO Content

Having a website is not the sole solution to transact business online, along with the appealing layout of your website you need engaging SEO content. There are some online builders, for example webstarttoday.com, which offer SEO friendly content, which is also easy to edit as per your business needs.

Pros and Cons of Using an Online Site Builder

Due to numerous advantages associated with online website builders, majority of people worldwide now make use of one of these conventional website builders for developing their own websites. Nevertheless, some people feel apprehensive about using free website building services over paid services. Given below are some pros and cons of website builders that will help you make an intuitive decision.

Pros

Free Design and Templates:

Numerous online platforms offer a variety of designing tools and customizable templates along with myriad graphics and integrated multimedia files to choose from. You can easily build your website from scratch. Just Drag and drop images on your website, change color themes and easily personalize your website.

Professional Appeal without Paying Hefty Fee:

Online website builders enable business owners build a professional website at minimal cost. Most of the online platforms offer an extensive base of professional designs that allow business owners to select a look that is best suited for their business. Professional designers build all designs available on these platforms.

Free Hosting

One thing that you worry the most when thinking of creating a website is the host service, the domain name, and the cost they both involve. A month cost for hosting services may go up to 10$ depending on the site you choose, above mentioned website builders are some of the hosting services provider which you may find online. These website help you secure a subdomain name for free. Nevertheless, you can have an independent domain name, but then it’s a paid service.

Cons

Limited Design Options:

Designs templates available on website builder are pre-made and limited in number. Moreover, since these websites offer only templates, some of you may not be able to personalize your website to your heart’s content. 

You May Still Require More:

Although you would find a vast range of features available on a website builder, but sometimes your business may require more. For example if you are planning to sell products on your website, then you will need a shopping cart to facilitate secure transactions. When building a free website your transactions won’t be too secure, but if you are only advertising something, then free site would suffice.

Inability to Use Your Own Domain Name

When you build a website through a free website builder, you don’t have to pay for your domain name and hosting. However, this won’t be your own domain name, which means such website won’t serve you any purpose if you want to earn from your site. Besides, hundreds of advertisements will pop up on your site, which can be highly irritating.