Build Your own Site.

There is a lot more to web design and integration than simply the physical appearance of your site and that’s why we are confident that our costs represent outstanding value for money no matter what solution you choose.

However there are online services that offer you the opportunity to develop your own website. You need to exercise some caution when choosing such a service as some claim to be free only for you to later discover that, following your hard work, the only way for you to host your site is through them. Needless to say these hosting costs can be unnecessarily high.

Nonetheless there are two services that do provide an excellent option if you are simply looking for a basic web presence. These sites are constructed using templates but still take some time and little practice to put together. We still think that our basic starter package beats them hands down but fully understand that some will choose to have a go themselves.

Moonfruit:

Moonfruit offer a work space they call SiteMaker. The overall layout of SiteMaker is extremely stylish, resembling the Mac OS X interface and is thus extremely easy to use. There are two views, basic or advanced. The latter does not really add very much in terms of design elements for more experienced users, but does provide easier access to some options such as admin tools and member groups.

Moonfruit claims that over two million sites have been built using SiteMaker, and it’s easy to see why. The interface is intuitive and very pleasant to use. While more advanced users will find the range of options rather limited, despite the various widgets that are included in paid packages, this will not bother the vast majority of people who simply need to get a good-looking site online quickly. This is a recommended service for inexperienced designers.

Wix:

You may well of heard of Wix as they are favoured by many younger people. Wix describes its website building tool as something that allows users to “create a free Flash website” within a matter of minutes. If the idea of creating a free website, with the trendiest Flash features, grabs your attention then Wix could be for you. However it is not quite as simple as Wix suggest and could be quite time consuming for the complete novice. However if you are at all familiar with web applications you should find Wix useful.

With Wix templates you can literally click on any element within the page and a drop-down menu, with multiple options, appears. There are thousands of full-customizable templates that users can choose from. The menu options are very self-explanatory if you know what you want to do. The simplest tasks are easy to do without any knowledge of website building or programming languages. However, when you attempt anything slightly more advanced (not using a template) the interface can seem a little difficult, even for a person that builds and manages a variety of blogs.

However the quality of the design is definitely the strongest points of Wix. From unique backgrounds to interactive slideshows, Wix enables inexperienced users to produce attractive websites. However, as it’s based upon Flash, these sites will be relatively difficult to get noticed by the search engines.