Web site builders & CMS

ABOUT WEB SITE BUILDERS

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Web site builders come in 3 types, human, PC based programs and hosted.

Most people who have no experience or knowledge of designing web pages will opt for the hosted type of web site builder, where you sign up to a web hosting company, sometimes free, and they give you a chunk of web-space with a site builder facility.  It is simple to operate and you sometimes end up with a reasonable looking web page. These web site builders are intended for people who just want a personal web site; if you're going to use it for trading, forget it!  No-one will ever find your pages and the pages themselves will look cheap and amateurish.  Your would-be clients will consider your products likely to be as poor quality as the pages promoting them.

Site builders not compliant with W3C

Unfortunately, on the technical side, such a site builder will more often than not produce a web page that has many faults that the user will not be able to see.  The faults are in the code that is used to form the page.  Some faults make the search engines reject the page for ranking.  Even if they accept it the near-certain ranking position you will get is somewhere in the thousands.  Not much good if you are relying on it for business.  Check your website for faults at the official html standards website W3C.

Once the page is running the owner decides that it is getting nowhere in the search engines, and so an expert is called in to optimise it, like me.  In order to do so the SEO (search engine optimisation) expert needs to work on the code.  To start with, all of the faults need to be corrected, and then the optimisation begins.  This nearly always causes a problem because the host does not allow anyone to have direct access to the server where the page is stored.  It is possible to download the page in order to work on it, but it is not possible to upload the edited version.

It is then often decided that the only way forward is to move the page to a host where server access is allowed.  This access is achieved by FTP, 'file transfer protocol'.  The web page cannot be moved, however, because it was manufactured by a program that the host has control over, and has a copyright on.  All of the site builder scripts, templates and probably images are copyright, so they cannot be used or reproduced.

The answer to all of this is - DO NOT USE HOSTED WEB SITE BUILDERS - if you want your page to get highly ranked!  Also, see below for comments on CMS.

Avoiding website builders means that you will have to take a little more time and effort to learn a few basics, get a web page builder program that will run on your PC, one that allows you to construct a web page visually, such as Nvu which is free;   First Page, an excellent low cost program with many great features; Antechinus Javascript Editor, which is an all-purpose tool for writing websites using Javascript,  HTML, PHP etc. and is the best one around in my opinion, although requiring more advanced knowledge; or perhaps Frontpage or Dreamweaver which are more expensive.  There are others of course.  That bit of time you spend learning how to use the program will be well repaid by allowing your web pages to be fault free and flexible, easy to manage and optimise.  Try the free ones first to get used to the idea.

Make sure you get a hosting company that allows FTP, which is most of them nowadays, but some still do not.  In UK, Supanames is recommended - in USA I have heard favourable reports about Westhost.

In order that you can carry out FTP operations, why not download Filezilla Client, it's free and one of the best. 

Having produced a page from a PC based program, it is then a matter of going to the next stage, optimisation.  That's where you need someone who knows what to do.  That's me. 

Of course you can always get me to design and build your website - the human web page builder!

If you have any doubts about the best way to get started, contact me for free advice.

I'm not saying that I cannot do anything if your website was built by a site-builder, but I need to see it to be sure, so contact me with the details and I will let you know.

Web CMS

A Web CMS, or Web Content Management System, is similar to the website builders described above.  CMS, however, is more often aimed at commercial clients, and can be much more sophisticated and consequently more expensive.  Unfortunately many or all of the drawbacks of simple website builders often prevail.

Few CMS packages allow the end user to have access to the raw data in the server using FTP, which prevents the SEO expert from doing what is necessary for high search engine placement.

If you intend spending money on a website for your business, and you want good search engine ranking positions, the best method is to employ a website designer and an SEO expert.

The problem with all of these website builder or CMS packages is that once you get involved it can be very difficult and costly to break away after you realise the adversities.