Website Sitebuilders:
Easy to use Website builders Come with a Price
by Joe Duchesne
Professional web designers don't come cheap. A
good web designer can easily charge you $1000 or more for a five page website.
This high cost leads many people to tackle web design for themselves. How hard
can it be? Get yourself an HTML editor, throw up a website and voila! Your
website is live right? Wrong! There is a lot of knowledge you need to develop
before you can get your self made website onto the internet.
What is a Sitebuilder?
More and more web hosting companies today offer
Sitebuilder software that takes care of all the technical details to getting
your website up and live on the internet. They allow a novice to choose a built
in template, select some colors, throw in some pictures, and add some text. Once
these steps are done, all the novice has to do is publish their website to the
internet. All the hard stuff is taken care of by the Sitebuilder software. So
what's the catch?
Next to Impossible to Move your Website to
Another Company.
Most Sitebuilders in use by web hosting
companies today are designed to make it as difficult as possible for their users
to transfer their website away. Most, if not all the fancy features like
counters, navigation, templates, etc... are built into the Sitebuilder and won't
work unless you have an active account with that particular company. If you want
to take your website elsewhere, you will have to build your website again from
scratch.
Cookie cutter approach tends to look amateurish
Sitebuilders in generally lack the flexibility
to allow the website creator to create a website any way they like. Most
Sitebuilders out there will lock you into doing things in one way – their way.
This leads to websites that can look like they were just thrown together and
therefore look unprofessional.
Little ability to handle traffic growth.
Most Sitebuilders come with enough storage
space and monthly data transfer to meet the average website's needs. If your
website traffic truly takes off though, chances are, your Sitebuilder company
will cut you off. Most hosting companies bank on the fact that 99% of it's
clients will use relatively little resources. If your website starts to use too
many server resources, most companies will pull the plug on your website. If
your website is built with their Sitebuilder, you'll be out of luck and in the
unenviable position of needing to rebuild your website right when a ton of
traffic is hitting a dead page. Not pretty.
Sitebuilder or traditional web hosting account
– which is for you?
If you have never put together a website
before, and you have no desire to dive into the technical details of putting
your website online, a Sitebuilder is probably your best fit. For maximum long
term flexibility and growth potential, learning how to get your website live on
a traditional web hosting account is well worth the effort. You will end up
paying less, you won't be locked into one company, and you will be able to grow
your website as traffic demands it.
About the Author:
This article was written by Joe Duchesne,
president of http://www.yowling.com/,
a web hosting company that offers traditional Web Hosting plans. Copyright 2004
Yowling. Reprint Freely as long as you provide a clickable link back to my
website from this resource box.
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