There are many tools out there that you can use to create a personal website. These range from simple to complex and free to premium, but they mostly come down to two major categories: cloud website builders and content management systems (CMS).
These two are the best and most popular ways of creating personal websites today, and that can be attributed to many factors, such as their ease of use, efficiency, pricing, etc. However, they are also quite different tools, and you need to understand them both to pick the most suitable platform.
Creating Using a Website Builder
A website builder is a cloud-based application that helps users create a professional-looking website quickly and easily. They do this by providing templates that can be customized by adding and removing elements to come up with a fully functional custom website.
Some of the most popular website builders are Wix and Squarespace.
Advantages of Website Builders
- Ease of use
Website builders are designed to be used by people with little or no technical skills. To create a website, you won’t need any coding skills as the platforms use a simple drag and drop technique. You can select a design that you like and then edit the interface, buttons, images, and add/ remove elements all with your mouse.
Read also: How to Create a Personal Website
- Reduced cost
Using a website builder is quite friendly on the pocket as you don’t require to hire a designer or contract a design agency. Hiring a professional designer can be expensive depending on what you need, often costing upwards of $3,000.
There are website builders that let you get started for free, but typically you will only require to pay about $5-$40 a month. This price usually includes other services such as hosting and various perks.
- Make changes from anywhere
Website builders are usually provided as software as a service (SaaS) on the cloud. This means that everything you need (including all your web files) is online-based, and so it’s always accessible. All you need is to log in to your account and make the changes you need then republish your website.
- Reduced time
Website builders simplify the entire website creation process, and you can get online with no time. This can be quite helpful when you need the personal website for an urgent project that you are working on or you simply want to cut the losses you never knew you were making due to lack of a website.
When using a builder, you can start with a pre-designed template of your choice or have one automatically created depending on your website needs. From there, you can then edit elements using drag and drop and personalize the site. Since there are no coding complications, you can get online within a few hours!
Creating Using a CMS
A content management system is a software (often open-source) that facilitates the creation of websites and manipulation of content on the website. Like website builders, they let users create a site easily and sometimes without manually editing code.
However, unlike website builders, CMS platforms do not focus on ease of use. Rather, they aim to let users play a bigger role in the design, and therefore there’s a steeper learning curve. Users often need to have HTML and CSS skills to edit underlying code.
Some of the most popular website builders are WordPress.org and Joomla.
Advantages of Using a CMS
- Greater customization
The fact that CMSs require more technical skills also means that users have more freedom to edit and customize their website. Once you select a theme, you can go beyond drag and drop to customize specific elements of your theme either on the theme’s editor or even in the code.
This means that in CMS, your website doesn’t have to look similar to others that use the same theme, and so the uniqueness will help push your brand better.
- A huge number of themes & plugins
CMSs are usually open-source, and so you can find thousands of themes, both free and paid. For example, WordPress provides 5,000+ themes that you can use for free. There are also very many other themes that you can purchase for a reasonable fee, and you can even opt to have one custom-built for you.
Apart from that, CMSs usually have very many third-party plugins which can help you add unlimited features and functionalities to your personal website.
- Flexibility
One of the great advantages of using a CMS is that you are not tied to a particular theme or even hosting platform. In case you wish to change your theme, a CMS will allow you to do so while still retaining everything you have on your website. If you are not happy with your hosting provider for whatever reason, you can also migrate your website easily using a plugin.
- Scalability
Growth is always a target for any brand, and so you need a website that allows you to move to the next level. This can be in terms of performance when website traffic begins to grow or in terms of adding new features.
CMSs provide this capability as users are not tied in terms of server resources as you can always upgrade your plan or even move to a new hosting platform. Apart from that, it’s easy to add new features and functionalities (for example a blog or an e-commerce store) even after launching your website.
- Better content organization
Just like the name suggests, a CMS is meant to help users to manage content easily. Everything on your site can be managed from the CMS editor, and you can categorize content into groups or sections, schedule publishing, automatically update menus & links, etc. You can also help users look for content easily by adding search functionality on the website.
Bottom Line
Both cloud website builders and CMSs are great tools for building a personal website. The guide above helps you analyze the two and know what each of them does better than the other. The choice ultimately depends on your needs, but you won’t go wrong with any of them.
