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Why Wix, Weebly and Squarespace exist alongside WordPress

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WordPress is too much for the typical small business owner to manage.

Photo of man at desk with broken website
Yesterday I got yet another reminder of why managed website builder services like Wix, Weebly and Squarespace exist.

I updated the plugins on one of my WordPress sites and POOF! The site broke. Completely. You couldn’t access it. I couldn’t even access the WP-Admin to turn off the plugins to troubleshoot it.

With a bit of help from GoDaddy, I was able to FTP to the site and remove the plugins folder to diagnose the issue.

But here’s the thing: talk to the average small business owner about updating plugins or FTP’ing into their site and they’ll lose you.

That’s why site builders exist. Anyone can create a site using them. They don’t have to worry about updating plugins and breaking their site. Security is handled behind the scenes.

Using a site builder instead of WordPress comes with drawbacks but it’s a huge market for a good reason.

The problem with WordPress

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WordPress is too complex for the average small business owner to use. The on ramp needs to be simpler.

GoDaddy’s integration with Beaver Builder makes it easier for people with no tech skills to customize a website. But it’s still not quite there.

WordPress powers 31% of the web. I’ve used it on this very blog since 2005. But WordPress has a problem for the millions of small business owners that don’t have a website: the learning curve.

That’s why I’ve reviewed WordPress alternatives like Wix, Weebly, SquareSpace, Yahoo Small Business and GoCentral.

These website builders make it much easier to get started than WordPress. The problem is that they can’t easily be exported to WordPress when a website owner is ready to harness more flexibility and customization. (One exception is DreamHost’s Remixer, although that’s not a very competitive site builder.)

With 13 years of WordPress experience, it’s easy for me to do just about anything required in the Admin interface. But when it comes to customizing the look and feel of a site, it’s difficult unless you’re a coder. Gutenberg promises to make some of this easier, but the site structure itself will still be difficult.

Some of the pre-built frameworks can help but still have a long way to go. Consider Genesis, which this site and PodcastGuests.com are built on. The Genesis framework is designed to make customizing a site easier, but I still can’t use it without a developer.

There are lots of great themes for Genesis. The problem is that the out-of-the-box experience with these themes is nothing like what you’d expect. They are installed with a default blog structure rather than what the theme looks like, and users have to then dig into widgets to recreate the desired look.

WP Engine acquired StudioPress, the maker of Genesis, earlier this year. It has a big opportunity here. It should create a one-click experience for people to choose a theme built on Genesis that matches the layouts shown on the site.

Of all the WordPress experiences I’ve tried, GoDaddy’s seems to be the closest to hitting the mark for making it easy to customize a site. This is thanks to an integration with Beaver Builder, a drag-and-drop plugin for WordPress. GoDaddy asks for your site category and contact details, layers in its Primer theme, and then lets users customize their site using Beaver Builder. Here’s an example of a site built on GoDaddy and Beaver Builder.

It’s still too difficult for someone who isn’t experienced with the WordPress admin, but at least it doesn’t require a developer to create the site.

Automattic’s WordPress.com is another viable alternative. The sign up process asks how skilled the creator is and customizes the experience accordingly.

The holy grail is to allow people to create a site on a sort of WordPress-lite. Something that doesn’t look like WordPress…something like the site builders. Then, when people are ready for the added flexibility that WordPress brings, they can unlock it be converting to the full version of WordPress.

Building a site on Squarespace

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Hopefully you read my overview of sitebuilders including Wix, Weebly and Squarespace. In today’s post, I’m going to explain how I built a site on Squarespace.

(I want to be clear up front that I’m not ranking the site builders. I built different types of sites on each service, and my goal is to explain how the process worked for me.)

I used a newly-registered domain name for my site: Bartending.school. It was a premium domain name, but the $220-a-year price tag seemed reasonable given the high search volumes for bartending school topics.

Like the other site builders, Squarespace didn’t ask me about a domain name before I got started. Instead, I selected a template and started building the site. It wasn’t until I was ready to publish that I had to select my domain and pay for anything.

Building

I selected a template and started building out my site. Overall, Squarespace was extremely easy to learn and use. There were a couple of site design procedures that confused me a bit, such as editing the top menu and the sections of the website. In one instance, I couldn’t figure out how to exit out of a screen and ended up hitting the back button. But Squarespace has good help pages that walked me through the few hurdles I faced.

I particularly like the ease of making sitewide changes to fonts and text sizes through the style editor.

Change text size, color and font sitewide through the Style Editor.

My site takes advantage of regular pages as well as blog pages. Squarespace’s built-in blog system has few of the bells and whistles you get with WordPress. But, keeping with the simplicity, it’s easy to use.

The Squarespace blog editor.

Blog pages are also compatible with AMP, which could help you get more traffic for Google.

While Wix has “apps” that can be plugged into your site similar to what Shopify offers, all of Squarespace’s apps (called integrations) are available by default. You can see them here.

I spent quite a bit of time building the site because I drafted all of the content from scratch. But once I got the hang of Squarespace, adding new content was very easy.

 

Packages

Squarespace makes you pay before you can publish (some competitors let you published a branded-site on a subdomain without paying).

Here’s the pricing for regular (not e-commerce) websites:

Personal Plan – $16 a month or $144 a year.
Business Plan – $26 a month or $216 a year.

The business plan adds additional features including the ability to add some customized code to your header and in the site. It also comes with some ecommerce capabilities, although for those you might want to opt for one of the dedicated e-commerce packages.

The customized code injection and code blocks in the business plan will be necessary if you want to add third-party javascript widgets such as Adsense. But, as with all of these site builders, you can’t edit code line-by-line.

It’s worth noting that Squarespace doesn’t offer email. Instead, it has a partnership with Google to offer G Suite’s basic plan. This is typical for site builders.

After selecting a plan, I connected my domain bartending.school to the website by adding DNS records at my domain registrars. A free domain comes with all annual packages. (Of course, not a premium one like bartending.school.)

Publishing and Promoting

Once your site is built, any changes you make to the site will instantly be published when you save them.

Squarespace integrates directly with Google Search Console. Once your site is built you can click a few buttons to add it to Search Console. Your sitemap will automatically be submitted as well.

Once nice feature is that you can access much of your Search Console data from directly within the Analytics section of Squarespace.

Overall

I am very impressed by Squarespace. Just looking at my site, It’s much more professional looking that something I could have created in the same amount of time with WordPress. I can see why a small business would opt to use Squarespace as opposed to WordPress.

Testing out the website builders: Wix, Weebly and Squarespace

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In the coming days I will review my experience building sites with several popular website builders.

The way in which small businesses get online has changed. It used to be that everyone searched for a domain name as a starting point. Once they registered a domain, they’d build a website.

A handful of web presence companies have turned that model on its head. Wix, Squarespace and Weebly take a site-first approach. They help customers design a website and then link them to a domain name later.

The model is working.

Wix is publicly traded on the Nasdaq (WIX) and has a market cap of nearly $5 billion. In May it reported Q1 revenue of $137.8 million, up 49% year-over-year. It had 3.4 million paying customers at the end of Q1.

There’s not much public data available about Weebly and Squarespace. There will soon be more data about Weebly because it was acquired by publicly-traded Square (NASDAQ: SQ) earlier this year for $365 million.

It’s clear that people are gravitating toward these company’s site-first onramps.

In many ways, it’s not a battle of domain name registrars like GoDaddy (which mostly focus on the domain as the starting point) vs. the site builders. Instead, it’s a battle of WordPress vs. the site builders.

Over the past month or so I’ve tested each of these company’s site builders by building a site on them. I’ve reflected on the experience compared to creating sites on WordPress–something I’ve done since 2005. Here are the advantages of the site builders: Click here to continue reading…

Here are the domain and website biz’s 2 Super Bowl commercials

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Watch the 2 2018 Super Bowl commercials related to websites and domain names.

While GoDaddy was absent in this year’s Super Bowl, much of the growth in domain names and people getting online these days comes courtesy of website builder services such as Squarespace, Wix and Weebly. The former two spent heavily during the Super Bowl to acquire new customers.

Here are their two ads:

Squarespace – I wasn’t impressed with this commercial featuring Keanu Reeves. The idea was to snag attention and then get people to visit Squarespace.com/keanu. I like the “Make it Happen” message, but why not at least show off a website in the ad?

Wix – Comedy duo Rhett and Link showed off Wix’s website builder. Incidentally, Rhett and Link use the domain name Mythical.co, and they use Mythical.store for their merchandise store.