How GoDaddy Stands Out

When beginning my investigation into GoDaddy, I was floored by the amount of stuff they offer. For one thing, GoDaddy offers hosting for open-source WordPress in addition to all the services they have around their own sites. I knew I would be getting into something interesting here. GoDaddy offers everything from a website builder (which will be the focus of this post) to professional services related to SEO. You can even pay GoDaddy to teach you how to optimize your site for search engine results (most other sites leave that up to a plugin, but more on that later).

GoDaddy’s Website Builder

The first thing to note about GoDaddy’s website builder is that it’s the only one so far for which I’ve had to enter credit card info to get my “free” trial. Now, the trial is free—I have until a month from now to cancel—but this is a remarkably different approach than the other builders have taken. Squarespace, Wix, WordPress.com, and Weebly all have a completely free tier. GoDaddy has no such offering.

From there, I set off on my usual course of setting up a photography portfolio. At this point, GoDaddy’s website builder reminds me the most of Weebly’s. Much like Weebly, GoDaddy takes “drag and drop” website building all the way. You physically move features from a menu on the left to the page in development on the right. Much like Weebly, you see the site take shape before your eyes. You know exactly how each feature looks without needing to navigate away from your build by pressing “preview”.

Familiar Issues with Looking Generic

The tier I paid for (that is: signed up to pay for after my trial ends) is GoDaddy’s middle tier, which costs $9.99/month. Most of the other website builders offer a wider range of layouts and, moreover, a wider range of customization at similar price tiers. The photography portfolio theme they have available isn’t nearly as modern and clean as the offerings from SquareSpace and Wix. I can’t even tell the difference between their “Lawyer” and “Consultant” themes.

GoDaddy’s Paid Features

Godaddy falls somewhere between Weebly and WordPress.com when it comes to getting what you pay for.

It’s cheaper to add video and audio on WordPress.com than Weebly. GoDaddy takes a somewhat different approach and allows you to integrate YouTube into your site even at their cheapest tier ($5.99/month). It’s a great way to get a video on the site, but you might not have the robust analytics WordPress.com provides.

Weebly does a bit of a better job helping you drag and drop your various features into place. My experience with GoDaddy was that I was placing features on my site that fell where they may and were hard to make visual sense with. This is a bad thing for my photography site and any small business or nonprofit site. GoDaddy repeats all over their wares that you can do the whole thing with no “technical skill.” This is a bit of a stretch considering how haphazardly their sites seem to come together.

GoDaddy Doesn’t Seem Focused on their Website Builder

I mentioned above that GoDaddy sells “SEO Services”, a field most of the other builders I’ve written about offer with a feature or plugin of some kind. Granted, GoDaddy offers just that on their highest paid tier.

The reason I note this is that the process of doing real SEO—not the magical kind so many people talk about—takes a ton of ongoing work. A widget you can configure inside your site builder based on your specific needs and your specific audience is important to keep real SEO top-of-mind. The fact that a tool is not available for this until the highest paid tier, but professional services are available for it at an additional costs is indicative of how GoDaddy seems to run their business. Servers, logo design, WordPress hosting, SEO services, even domain parking are all for sale at GoDaddy. GoDaddy’s business is in selling you the peripherals of your website, not the core functionalities. Even the highest paid SEO consultant is not going to be able to handle the ongoing work of following the industry that you know best. What good are servers when you’re looking for an introductory website for your small business? Because all of these things appear to be at the forefront of GoDaddy’s strategy, their website builder really doesn’t stand out in significant ways.

Key Takeaways about GoDaddy

GoDaddy reminds me the most of Weebly. Like Weebly, GoDaddy took the term “drag and drop” very seriously. Compared to Weebly, however, GoDaddy’s builder seems less intuitive, less foolproof. If you’re looking for a simple website solution, you probably need something that is going help you avoid mistakes, and GoDaddy doesn’t seem to be it.

It’s worth noting that GoDaddy’s website builder has no free tier; this is unlike every other we have looked at so far. GoDaddy has many extras they can sell you when it comes to building a site and a brand. However, when it comes to things like logos and SEO consulting, you’re probably better off at a boutique than at a big company like GoDaddy. GoDaddy is a good builder if you’re ready to jump in and stay committed to one platform. They have so much under one roof and so few options for customization, it would be hard to go elsewhere once you get started.

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Welcome to the fourth post of Evermore’s series on popular website builders. I’ll be taking you through Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, GoDaddy, and WordPress.com. While Evermore sites are powered by WordPress, we know that it’s not for everyone. This series will help you learn which website builder suits your needs today, and what you may want to look into as you grow. We’re getting Weebly today!

Where Weebly Fits in with Other Website Builders

Changing gears from our last post about WordPress.com, Weebly is very much an entry-level website builder. While all the website builders I’ve covered so far have a degree of “drag and drop” method for making a webpage, Weebly leads the pack. Nearly 100% of the actions you’ll take to build a site on Weebly involve dragging a feature onto your page, dropping it where it fits, and filling in your content.

Weebly’s Unique Drag and Drop Builder

I must admit that Weebly stood out compared with the other website builders I’ve tested so far on this journey. Wix, Squarespace, and even WordPress.com function in very similar ways on the back end where you build the site. You select a theme, you fill it with content, and maybe you get to customize some fonts, colors and backgrounds.

Weebly is closest to Squarespace in terms of what you can add to the site and what you can customize (i.e. not much). The similarities pretty much stop there. Weebly is almost entirely a graphical development interface. It’s an interesting experience to work with Weebly because I am so used to working in a website builder that essentially resembles a Microsoft Word document. Wix, Squarespace and WordPress.com all have an open text box on the right and a menu of features and widgets on the left. You enter you content, add images, video, etc as desired and you publish a page. To change the theme, you click into another menu and are sent to a similar editing layout where you change the background colors and/or images.

Weebly essentially puts all the editing in one place.After you select a theme in Weebly you’re set to start editing. One major difference is that when you choose a theme in Wix, Squarespace, and WordPress.com you pretty much just have to fill it in with your content. As I’ve been working on this series, I’ve been sampling “photo gallery” themes across the board to get an apples-to-apples comparison. On the first three, after I select my theme, I start uploading pictures. On Weebly, even after I have selected a gallery theme, I have to drag the “photo gallery” from the menu of buttons and tools onto the page itself. This actually took me a couple tries to get right. Weebly has a box that indicates where to drop the features you want to add, but the features I was dragging and dropping weren’t staying. Eventually I got it to work, and noticed that Weebly makes a few subtle signs to tell you things are in the right place, but I would say it’s far from intuitive.

Once I had the gallery feature in place on my gallery theme, Weebly finally asked me to upload some pictures. This is about as easy as it is anywhere else on the web, and it works as expected. Weebly does make it a bit easier to customize the overall theme (to the extent that you can). For their gallery theme, you can change the background image from their preset to one of your own. You do this from the same page that you drag and drop features. This is handy. You edit your theme and your content on the same page. Wix, Squarespace, and WordPress.com don’t let you do it this way.

This is one cool facet of Weebly because you actually see the website come together as you build it rather than having to push “preview,” or worse, “publish.”

Customization on Weebly

The chaos of what seems like a simple interface comes in, once again, with the options available. Weebly lets you drag in galleries as mentioned as well as images, calendars, maps, forms, social icons and others. Video, audio, and a site search box are available on paid tiers. All this stuff could be put on any page of your site. This seriously undermines the idea of selecting a theme. As I’ve mentioned before, resources like this are only helpful when they are carefully designed so that your visitors actually want to interact with them. But that’s only part of the problem.

When you drag and drop a new feature such as a map or a product you want to sell, Weebly moves you into a field to edit that new feature. It takes you out of the page you’re editing into a popup box to finish the feature before you go back to the page. This seems counter-intuitive to the idea of dragging and dropping features.

Weebly is pretty good at being fool-proof, though. One of the “features” you can drag and drop is custom HTML. This is something none of the others besides WordPress.com are any good at. I can’t think of many good reasons to drop custom HTML into a box on the middle of a pre-laid-out web page, but I gave it the ole college try. I tried putting what I thought should make a calendar widget in the custom HTML box. Apparently I did something wrong because my calendar never showed up, but fortunately, neither did a bunch of raw code. The HTML box is “smart enough” to look at my broken widget and say “nope, not gonna show this to anyone.”  Instead, it just disappears from the site preview like it was never there. Which is good! I’m used to living in a world where one omitted “/” turns a decent website into a movie still from The Matrix.

Weebly’s Pricing Packages

Like all of the website builder’s we’ve looked at, Weebly prices in tiers. Weebly’s prices aren’t terribly higher or lower than WordPress.com, Wix, and Squarespace. The biggest difference is what you get for each price tier. WordPress.com, for example, gives you 3GB of storage space on their free tier whereas Weebly only offers 500MB. For reference, any site that is heavy on high quality photos will exceed 500MB quickly. Weebly does grant unlimited storage with their first paid tier ($8/month) but it’s unlikely that any small business is going to use more than the 3GB WordPress.com offers for free. Also of note is that Weebly asks you to be at the $8 dollar tier in order to have a professional, custom domain (i.e. yoursite.com instead of yoursite.weebly.com) whereas WordPress.com only asks you to be at their $2.99 tier for the same benefit. The video, audio and search boxes don’t start until the $12/month tier with Weebly. Video and audio are available on the $8 tier at WordPress.com.

To summarize the pricing differences, it seems that Weebly has built their subscriptions around users who want a few features for free, or many features for a premium. A lot of small businesses and nonprofits fall somewhere in between those extremes and may want a solution that’s priced accordingly.

Key Takeaways about Weebly’s Website Builder

Weebly probably has the lowest barrier to entry of any of the website builders. They are extremely committed to their drag and drop interface which makes it easier for folks who have never interacted with web code to make websites. You can watch your pages come together as you build them without the need to hit the preview button, but as you add features you often get torn away from this page to build that feature. Plugins and options for customization are basically nonexistent apart from the option to add some custom HTML in a box on your pages. The ease with which you can drop the included features might make it a bit too easy to put too much stuff on your site which ruins customer experience. I would recommend Weebly to a business or nonprofit that needs a fairly static, simple website. Weebly is the most limiting of all the website builders so far, but it might be the easiest for someone with little web experience to still have fun with!

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Transparency! At Evermore, we build sites for our clients on WordPress. We don’t get any money from WordPress for talking about them, nor do we get any money if you decide to try WordPress for yourself. Phew, all that said, let’s dive in!

What Makes WordPress.com Different

The first thing to note when comparing WordPress.com to website builders like Wix and Squarespace is that it’s core codebase is available as open-source software (simply called WordPress).

Briefly: software is considered open-source when the original authors of the code make it publically available for licensed developers to change and distribute as they wish. WordPress is website software that is 100% open for anyone to edit as they choose. The open-source version of WordPress is available at WordPress.org. It’s completely free to download and requires you to have your own server to run a website.

This post will focus on WordPress.com which comes in various grades from free to not-so-free, and is built more for people who don’t have time to learn everything about how CSS and HTML work.

Where WordPress.com Fits in with other Website Builders

Even from the free versions, WordPress.com is more versatile than Wix and Squarespace. On a very basic level, WordPress.com allows you to edit the HTML of pages within the theme that you select. You’re bound to the overall framework of the theme but are free to make more complex edits on each page. This is not available in Wix or Squarespace, though the latter does allow you to insert HTML into the <head>.

One thing that makes WordPress.com particularly valuable to a business with plans to start small and grow over time is the way they structure their free and paid tiers. All the website builders have some method of doing this but WordPress.com allows for the most room to grow by far. Things start at free. This includes a “yoursite.wordpress.com” domain and will feature WordPress.com ads around your content. It’s a great way to learn the ropes. You’ll probably want more features (and less ads as your business matures).

The first paid tier lets you have “yoursite.com” and removes ads.

The second paid tier adds video support, meaning you can host videos directly on WordPress.com instead of YouTube (great for bands, churches, schools). This second tier and the third tier also allow you to monetize your site by allowing WordPress.com to put ads back on your site. Only this time, you get a cut of the money based on the number of views you have. For any a small business other than media, this feature is probably useless at best, and actively bad for you at worst. For one thing, you’re probably not going to have enough views on the ads for to recoup what you’ve spent on the WordPress.com site itself. For another, you don’t have control over the ads WordPress.com includes and you could inadvertently end up advertising for one of your local competitors.

At both the second and third paid tiers WordPress.com gives you full access to the CSS of your website. This essentially allows for complete customization of things like color and font if you know your way around. Similar to the issues I mentioned with Wix’s plethora of third-parties, modifying your CSS is only a good idea if you have a strong eye for design and user experience. You could end up making changes that make it harder for people to use your site.

Much like the other website builders we have discussed so far, WordPress.com doesn’t allow you to do much with the themes they supply. This is good and bad. On the open-source (WordPress.org) side of WordPress, it’s not uncommon to find third-party themes and plugins that are bad for your site and your users. WordPress.com saves you from this by providing their in house themes which are vetted for safety and reliability by their developers. As with the others, this becomes a bit of a pain when you want a site that stands out from the rest, that reflects your brand and that your users delight in visiting.

Tracking Visitors with WordPress

All the tiers (from free on up) include some capability for seeing who visited your site and which posts/pages got the most views. It’s worth noting that these are WordPress.com’s homebrewed “Stats” which are not nearly as detailed as Google Analytics. Only the highest paid tier (~$300/year) allows for full integration with Google Analytics. This makes it more difficult to get good data out of a lower tier WordPress.com site, but if you’re operating on the lower end of the feature spectrum, it might not be as important to have the granular details that Google Analytics provides over WordPress.com stats. It would be nice if you could put Analytics in at lower tiers, but you probably don’t need to have it.

How to Soup-Up Your WordPress.com Site

WordPress.com definitely plays well with others. There’s a veritable cornucopia of plugins you can use to get more data out of your WordPress.com site and to make your site easier to build. WordPress.com includes popular plugins with the price you pay for your subscription. The included SEO tool makes it easy to keep best practices front and center as you add pages. Other included plugins let folks subscribe to your posts via email and automatically backup and secure your site from internet ne’er do wells.

Many of the most popular marketing tools, used by companies large and small have built plugins just for WordPress. Parsely provides insight into how visitors are finding your site. Optimizely allows you to A/B test which versions of your site get the most conversions. These (and many more) are available to add to your site. One thing to note: you need to have a paid account with each of these third parties first. That can add up quick. Also, you won’t be able to access the data these tools provide inside of WordPress.com. You’ll need to use the dashboards and graphics displayed on the third party sites to get any value from their plugins.

How Evermore Works with WordPress

At Evermore, we help customers tap into the full potential of WordPress’s open software. We feature world-class themes customized for each of our customers’ brands, and we support the site with a curated package of plugins which we’ve personally tested for quality and safety. If you want the fully customizeable experience of WordPress with the ease of use offered by WordPress.com, get in touch with us.

Key Takeaways about WordPress.com

Many, many, themes and plugins are available to make your WordPress.com site uber functional. Similar to Squarespace and Wix, these pre-built themes run the gamut from ecommerce store to photo gallery to business info page. WordPress.com doesn’t allow you to fully customize these themes but you can change colors and fonts at higher paid tiers. Tracking visitors is built in, but it might be nice to have Google Analytics available at all tiers, not just the most expensive one. Overall, WordPress.com might be one of the best website builders to grow with as you get significantly more control over the site the more you’re willing to pay for the site. When it comes to growth, WordPress.com offers the best option for moving beyond the “website builder” into a completely custom site. Should the day come that you move from WordPress.com to the open-source WordPress, moving your site is a simple as exporting your content from WordPress.com and uploading it into your new site on your host.

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Welcome to the second post of Evermore’s series on popular website builders. I’ll be taking you through Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, GoDaddy, and WordPress.com. While Evermore hosts our sites on WordPress, we know that it’s not for everyone. This series will help you learn which website builder suits your needs today, and what you may want to look into as you grow. This week, let’s talk Wix.

My Experience with Wix

I was first introduced to Wix during writing school when a good friend of mine suggested I make use of the site builder to show off some photographs I was taking. If you’ve followed along with the series so far, you already know that I ended up on Squarespace. But I’ve dusted off the old Wix account for you guys!

When I first checked Wix out years ago it reminded me a lot of what Squarespace is doing today. I saw a lot of fine but not outstanding templates. It was fairly easy to drag and drop stuff where I wanted with little to no knowledge of code necessary. That being said, you might want to go back and read my post on Squarespace if you haven’t already. A number of similarities apply to Squarespace and Wix. TL;DR version: super easy to get started even with no knowledge of code, but hard to customize and grow if and when you decide to do so.

That said, there are a few key differentiators worth talking about, such as…

Wix has Way More Free Stuff

This is a blessing and a curse, and you’ll see why as we go on. But at first glance, I thought it was great that I could get “free” background photos and even videos for my site. I’m sure you’ve been to a cool coffee shop’s website that has a nice “hero image” in the background that’s actually a silent video of one of their bearded baristas making a skim double latte. It even seems to loop perfectly right? Like he just moved on to making another drink. Well you can get videos like that with Wix—free. Cool!

There’s also an available “App Market” for third party apps you can add to your site such as scheduling tools for booking appointments, high resolution photo galleries (with watermark and copy + save protection), and dozens of others. In fact there were dozens of scheduling apps alone.

And that’s about the time my head started to spin. I was exploring Wix to see everything it was capable of, I wanted to see all the bells and whistles, but even so I got overwhelmed.

The Burden of Choice

If you’re looking for an introductory website builder such as Wix, you probably have a relatively straightforward project in mind—and probably just enough expertise with the web to know what looks good without really knowing why. For you, Wix could present a big problem with all the choices it offers.

Let’s go back to the scheduling tools I mentioned. If you know you need one on your website, you probably already have some workflow in place that uses a scheduling tool you like. Hopefully that tool is already in the Wix App Market. If not, you’ll have to install the widget yourself or switch to one supported by the Market. But first you’ll want to find reviews for it, and then test it to see if it works.

And like I said, the options don’t stop at scheduling tools. There are tools for forms, Paypal buttons, Instagram feeds, various social and email pop ups (side note: please never use these. No one likes anything that pops up and begs to be liked that isn’t a puppy).

All of these things could be great if you have a project that would make appropriate use of them. But, if you have a project that needs all of these tools, you probably need something a bit more robust on the design side.

Designing for Conversion on Wix

You’re on Wix because you know what looks good and you want to take advantage of the great background images and other content they have. When it comes time to add forms and donation buttons and event schedules, all of those things need to be designed to work together visually on your webpage.

If you’re taking the time to add all these apps to your site, you’re going to want people to actually use them, and that will only happen if they are designed well. From basic things such as how third party apps function on mobile, to more complex things such as whether or not you’re guiding eyes down the page to take action, design affects conversion. So while it’s great that Wix has so many options for so many different tools, if you don’t have the design background to get them on your site in a way that looks and functions well, it won’t make much difference.

Wix would be a great place to learn how to incorporate these tools into your site, but if you want to make the most of them you’ll find yourself wanting a professional designer. At that point, all the other bells and whistles can probably be custom made for you. You’ll not only have a better functioning site, but one that is more suited to your organization’s style.

Key Takeaways about Wix

Wix reminds me a lot of Squarespace for a lot of good reasons. It’s super easy to get started. You click, drag, and presto there is a site. You can get a bit more creative than Squarespace can with the free stock images and videos Wix provides. Still, you’re bound to “Brand Name” templates made by Wix that you won’t be able to customize much beyond pictures and font. Like Squarespace, you’ll be bound to how regularly Wix wants to keep these templates up to date with best practices for performance and usability.

Wix provides a much greater number of third party tools to help you optimize your site for your business. From shopping carts to photo galleries, the number of apps available on Wix is astounding. This seems a bit more useful in theory than in practice. If you’re really adding that many things to your page for visitors to interact with, you will probably want a designer around to help make sure it’s easy to interact with all of those fancy apps. At that point, you can probably start looking at fully customized options for both tools and site layouts.

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