You just struck out on your own and became an independent business owner, you’re an entrepreneur, you’re self employed, etc. You have an awesome idea and niche services you wish to offer to your future customers! But first you need a website. I mean who runs a service based business without a website? Besides risk takers or maybe gamblers! I wouldn’t suggest operating a business nowadays without a website! Let’s face it, no one reads the newspapers anymore! Mailbox flyers? Well sure out of 500 flyers printed you may get a 5-10% return if you are lucky! Don’t forget the added expense of a graphic design layout and then printing and distribution. No thank you, that can get pricey!
So, do you hire a big company to create a website for you? How do you know if you will be able to continue to afford their high monthly fees? The what ifs start to kick in. Don’t worry, there are a lot of free website builders out there that you can use right? Sure it’s easy, anyone can set up a website! It just takes time and patience, and some more time, and which website builder should you even use? I have to say, there are a lot of free options available out there for small business owners just starting out. Which I think is great, if you do have the time and patience for it. But knowing what to use long term and invest in would be beneficial. My recommendation will always be WordPress.
I feel slightly bias since that is what I like to use personally and for my small business owning clients. But hey if the shoe fits… Recently, I was hired for website management, that is to update and enhance an already built and designed website through Squarespace website builder. My client requested access to it from his former provider that set it up back in April 2021. So it was brand new, but just not bringing in any customers.
Right away, I could see some similarities between the two platforms. Both are very user friendly and easy to navigate in order to add pages and add images. Both offer SEO options to enhance and build performance for the website. I have to say, I found Squarespace very easy to use without ever having experience in using this platform, anyone could begin website building or designing. All good things really! You can add sections and change color palettes easily. I also liked a lot of their features offered such as image captions below or with hover options. No need to resize images either. I only ran into one issue where the image was too large and it provides advanced options to crop or resize as well.
The only major drawback I was disappointed with was when I was setting up the email forms, is that you can only have one email stored for the contact forms. This made it tricky in the sense that I had to set up another email address and have that forward to the two main receiving people for email leads which was the business owner and his admin assistant. This worked where I could add the main business email to the forms, and then that email branches off to the main company contacts. I wasn’t thrilled about that hiccup, but other than that, I think the platform may be a bit amateur in comparison to WordPress, or a bit clunky but overall a great start for any beginner!
Overall, WordPress is much more sophisticated and advanced for plugins, widgets and emails and such. So WordPress will always be my go-to and number one choice for website building and designs!
The Marketing Diva 