Designing a new website for your business can be a pretty intimidating task, but like all intimidating tasks, your fears can be mitigated by creating a to-do list and deciding what comes first. Once you’ve gone off and created that list (don’t worry, we’ll wait), one of the items that should be at the top of your list should be “choosing a platform on which to build the website.”
What’s a Website Platform?
A website platform is basically the operating system and the tools you use to create, build, and edit your website. They range from being very difficult to use for a novice but beautiful and custom-made to easy to use and easy to edit but not very customizable. There are three categories that these platforms fall into that range between easy to use and custom-made:
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Template Website Builders (WYSIWYG):
Template website builders let you choose from a variety of templates for your site that you can easily update like a Word document, but when it comes to customization, What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG).
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Development Platform:
These are language-based development platforms that require intimate knowledge of programming languages in order to build a website on them. The results are beautiful, feature-filled, custom websites.
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Content Management Systems:
CMSs are often a nice compromise when it comes to building a website – they are easy to use and update, but are able to be custom coded and beautifully designed.
The 5 Most Popular Website Platforms
There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of different website platforms to choose from, but below are the five most used that represent WYSIWYGs, CMSs, and development platforms. When choosing your preferred platform for your business’ web design, you’ll likely want to choose from the following:
Weebly
Weebly is one of the more popular WYSIWYG editors out there. It allows you to easily integrate your domain hosting into their system and features a “drag and drop” functionality that allows you to easily and quickly build a base website. If you’d prefer, Weebly provides hundreds of templates, some for free and some to purchase, that will make your site look finished while allowing you to fill in your information. However, because “what you see is what you get” customizing or making a new, distinct website for your business will be difficult.
Magento
Magento is a large-scale development platform specifically for ecommerce websites. It’s high-performance and scalable abilities make it the top ecommerce solution for large businesses. Rosetta Stone, Nike, and Olympus are just a few of the large brands that utilize Magento as their ecommerce platform. It’s a versatile platform that allows for advanced search engine optimization, connecting with third-party vendors, and real-time product and sales tracking – all while staying mobile responsive, too.
Drupal
Most developers agree that Drupal is the most powerful CMS available these days – you just need to be familiar with PHP, HTML, CSS, and other coding languages for web designing and development. So if you’re willing to jump into the steep learning curve with Drupal and learn how to code, you can make the beautiful website you see in your dreams come true.
Drupal is also known for making the most secure websites available, which is why many large-scale operations use Drupal for their website platform. Their system is so secure that it’s the preferred platform for whitehouse.gov.
Joomla
Joomla is another content management system that is considered harder to use than WordPress but easier than Drupal. Their modules are similar to plugins, the interface is user-friendly, and is suitable for both ecommerce sites and social media.
That being said, it can be hard to start using as a complete beginner and the modules can be difficult to maintain. While there is added functionality that Joomla has over a WYSIWYG editor, it has much fewer modules to choose from compared with WordPress’ plugin library.
WordPress
Considering that WordPress powers more than 25% of the websites, it’s not hard to believe that it’s the most popular CMS out there. In fact, WordPress holds between 50 and 60% of the global CMS market, and powers almost 15% of the top 100 websites in the world.
The reasons for this are simple: it’s user-friendly interface paired with powerful plugins and ability to be custom coded result in beautiful, easily updated websites. In simple terms, it’s the best of both worlds, easy to use like a WYSIWYG but with powerful coding abilities similar to a development platform.
Contact TheeHouston.Agency for your website development
Make a great decision for your business and contact TheeHouston.Agency for your web design services. Our indepth knowledge of Magento and WordPress will result in a beautiful, effective website that converts and sells! Call us at 281-764-9070 or request your free consultation.
