There are some free apps and some paid. Themes are tailored to specific industry, with relevant features automatically included. Shopify is a powerful online store builder that comes packed with features.
On the cheapest plan, you can expect:. There are even more exciting features on the advanced plans, including real-time shipping rates, manual foreign exchange rates, and professional reports. Kind of… if you need its big-hitting features.
To get real value, you need to be serious about scaling up your store and making use of its features. Ease of Use Big Cartel has a user-friendly onboarding process that helps you along by providing prompts and tips. Big Cartel is one of the few ecommerce platforms that let you sell for free. You can sell up to five products at no cost — and if you outgrow this, you can upgrade to a paid plan.
The cheapest Platinum plan lets you sell up to 50 products. This plan provides standard selling features — you can upload five images per product, use a custom domain, track shipments, and manage your inventory, for starters. Big Cartel has a small collection of designs to choose from.
Otherwise, you and your customers may be left feeling uninspired when it comes to visual branding. Big Cartel covers the basics, from Google Analytics integration to discounts and promotions. If you have a few products to sell, its basic features and limited designs may not pose a problem. Squarespace is our highest-rated portfolio website builder — it scored 4.
You get awesome features such as strong SEO tools and unlimited storage, plus award-winning template designs. Ease of Use Squarespace might not be as straightforward as some other builders out there, but recent improvements have made a big impact! This now makes it one of the simplest builders on the list. Its editor clearly signposts all the most important elements, and its row-oriented layout is perfect for keeping your design clean and professional.
Instead, it comes with a day free trial , which is a risk-free way to try out its premium offering. The Personal plan is pretty well-stocked with features.
Unlimited storage and bandwidth are great for media-heavy portfolios , strong SEO tools will help clients find your work, and a free domain saves you a little extra money. Whichever plan you opt for, make sure that you take advantage of our exclusive WBE discount code. Squarespace has the best templates designs on the market , claiming the highest score of 4.
All templates are mobile responsive and favor large images, with plenty of white space for a modern look. Customization is easy, and you can really make the template your own.
Its blogging and SEO tools are worth a special mention for being particularly extensive, and most portfolio templates come with contact forms and newsletter sign-ups automatically built-in for you to use or remove. You can add extra features to your site using Squarespace Extensions , which lets you integrate your portfolio with select third parties such as Printful, QuickBooks, and Smart SEO.
Yes, especially if you use your special WBE discount! If you want to get your portfolio off the ground as quickly as possible, GoDaddy is a great option. Overall, however, it should be noted that in our research, GoDaddy achieved an overall score of 4. Ease of Use GoDaddy is slightly different from other website builders because of the way it uses Artifical Design Intelligence ADI to create a website depending on your aims.
Alternatively, you can choose your own template from the many on offer. Once GoDaddy has built your site, you can still use the editor to add your own content and adjust the overall design. Pricing Like Squarespace, GoDaddy has no free plan, but it does offer a very generous one-month free trial, giving you the opportunity to test out exactly what it can do.
It allows you to organize one-time appointments with prospective clients, as well as connect with one social media platform, and send up to emails per month. However, more developed portfolios will require a more thorough roster of marketing tools. It hits the right notes with its excellent analytics tools, plus we really like that email marketing comes as part of the package, rather than as an added extra.
However, its lack of SEO features lets it down, plus the fact that many of its tools are limited unless you upgrade. Thanks to its excellent analytics features and the speed at which you can publish your website, GoDaddy is ideal for getting your brand-new portfolio website off the ground.
Therefore, we recommend upgrading when you can! Jimdo is a no-frills-attached builder that offers two ways of creating a website — using its ADI builder, or its classic editor. Both methods come with a free plan, however, its features are limited, making website growth tricky.
However, once you get into the editor, things get a bit confusing. Compared to the simple ADI process, any extra customization feels limited, which is why Jimdo only scored 3.
Although the free plan looks like an attractive option for getting online without spending a cent, it is severely limited. Opting for the Start plan solves many of these problems, as it removes ads and comes with a free domain name. Plus, customization is limited which affects how much personality you can inject into your website. Features The features that Jimdo has to offer are underwhelming, to say the least.
As a result, it scored a disappointing 1. Most shocking perhaps is that help and support are prioritized depending on your plan level. This means that those on the start plan will have to wait up to two days for a response, in comparison to a mere four hours for users on the Grow plan. Not really. Strikingly produces single-page portfolio websites, and aims to deliver a beginner-friendly editor interface for easy building.
Ease of Use Strikingly is extremely easy to use, and its editor makes it simple for you to customize your chosen template. On occasion, however, its simplicity works against it. Pricing With Strikingly, you can stay on the free plan, or opt for one of its three paid plans. The cheapest Limited plan is actually pretty generous, giving you a free domain for the year and allowing you to publish two Limited features for the price of one.
We think this is an easier choice than trying to make adjustments to your existing website design. If you want to make a good impression on your visitors and showcase more of your work, we recommend the Pro plan. Wix is a website builder that can do a bit of everything, so it comes well set up to support a portfolio website.
Expect a range of stylish, minimalist templates perfect for positioning your work in the spotlight, and robust SEO tools that will help increase traffic and clients. Ease of Use Wix came out on top in our ease of use testing, scoring an impressive 4. This is thanks to its grid-based drag and drop builder, which means you can select elements and drag them into your template, inserting them wherever you want, with just a few clicks.
This is particularly useful if this is your first experience of building a website. These options might look pricey, but the longer you commit to using Wix, the cheaper your monthly payments will be. It offers contracts that run monthly, yearly, every two years, and every 3 years.
Design Wix has over templates to choose from, a good chunk of which are great for Portfolios thanks to their clean, sleek design. We also love that you can drag images to wherever you want, and display them in attractive galleries. In addition to this, Wix allows you to add a blog, which not only helps to engage your visitors, but will also give your SEO a boost. Plus, we love the ability to insert images and videos wherever you like — it means you can display your pieces where and however you want!
Ease of Use WordPress. However, it is much easier to use than WordPress. If you want the power and blogging tools of WordPress. If, however, you want a totally user-friendly website builder, you may find it challenging getting started. In our user testing, WordPress. That said, WordPress. The cheapest paid plan, Personal , comes with a free domain for one year and 6GB storage space.
You can expect everything from comment management to social bookmarking to support your blog, as well as features such as social media integration and helpful analytics tools.
You get plenty of features included on this plan, with built-in blogging tools and access to free blogging-specific themes. You get a free domain for one year, and lots of storage — 6GB is more than a lot of starter plans offer. However, beginners may get less for their money because of WordPress.
We recommend trying its free plan before committing to a paid plan for this reason. When it comes to blogging, Squarespace delivers the whole package. It serves up exceptional designs, as well as offering blog-specific SEO and blogging features that really pack a punch. Its editor splits each template into rows, making it easy to zone in and tweak a particular part of the design.
This ensures that your blog is clean and uncluttered, no matter how many extra elements you want to add in! However, this approach to website-building is pretty divisive — you either love it or you hate it!
Pricing Although not the cheapest, Squarespace does deliver awesome value for money. It gives you a choice of four plans :.
Regardless of which you go for, you can save some money and reduce your overall cost even further by using our exclusive WBE discount code.
Design Design is where Squarespace excels. It does have a few drawbacks, though. The two major things missing from this list, however, are an archive function, and blogging analytics. This last feature, at least, can be fixed by connecting your blog to Google Analytics. It gives you access to a wide range of blogging tools, and its templates ensure that yours will be the best-looking blog on the block. Wix has made significant improvements in recent years, meaning that its blogging capabilities are now some of the best.
Ease of Use Thanks to its drag-and-drop format, our user research showed that Wix is the easiest builder to use, scoring 4. Its awesome creative control allows users to take the reins and gives them the tools to create their dream blog, without a single line of code in sight.
However, Wix is on hand to help. If you ever find yourself a little stuck, click on the small question mark icons for some extra support. Pricing Unlike Squarespace, Wix offers a fairly comprehensive free plan, so you can start blogging without the monthly payment. Design Wix is known for its expansive template library, so you should be able to find a template you love amongst the on offer. You can also search by industry, narrowing your selection down to those themes that are specifically recommended for blogs.
Each template comes with great customizability thanks to the free-range drag-and-drop editor. Just ensure that in the settings you select to turn off comments so as to avoid spam. Read our full WordPress review. Weebly is another online CMS, this time targeted at people with little or no coding experience, by providing easy to use drag and drop tools for creating a website.
Weebly also provides the ability for users to create online stores using existing templates to work with their simply website-building framework.
The number of themes available for Weebly is somewhat limited, but the designs are clean and professional-looking, plus there are options to personalize accordingly. Additionally, the themes are responsive, which means they are optimized to work with mobile devices, plus they have in built SEO, analytics, and even a feature for posting ads directly to Facebook.
There's a free tier available for basic use, and allows you to get used to the service. However, to use your own domain and get rid of ads, you'll need the Professional plan.
Read our full Weebly review. Webflow is a cloud-based service which has been created specifically to allow people with no coding knowledge to get started with web design. Aside from being truly cross-platform, as it's web-based, Webflow emphasizes the concept of 'smart codelessness'. In the first instance this means a crisp drag and drop interface allowing you to drop elements such as text and images seamlessly onto a page using one of the freely available templates.
Unlike many WYSIWYG editors, the code produced is very clean and well-written even if you choose the 'I have no coding experience' option during setup. You can make granular changes to individual elements using the panels on the right. Webflow offers a free demonstration of its features via the website, and you can also subscribe for a free Starter package which allows you to create up to two projects. Read our full Webflow review.
Bluefish is among the smallest web design tools available today. The tiny installer takes only a few moments to setup. While the interface is text-only, it's clearly designed with novices in mind as it employs clear-cut toolbars, user customizable menus and syntax highlighting. Bluefish has an excellent search function, allowing you to find text across multiple projects.
The tool also has no trouble juggling hundreds of documents at the same time. Squarespace is another good website builder that serves as a third alternative to Wix and WordPress. Much like Wix, Squarespace offers an intuitive drag-and-drop interface for creating your website.
Visit Squarespace. Here are a few great candidates to consider. Despite being one of the newest tools on this list, Figma is also one of the most powerful. Much like Sketch, the next app on this list, Figma features an intuitive, vector-based interface that makes designing websites simple. What makes Figma really shine, however, is its collaborative, cloud-based approach. With Figma, multiple team members can edit a design file simultaneously. Business stakeholders can also leave comments, and developers can copy code snippets to simplify the process of turning your design into a real site.
Figma offers a free plan that includes up to 3 projects. Visit Figma. Sketch is an extremely popular interface design tool focused on simplifying the process of creating beautiful, high-fidelity mockups. Sketch gained popularity in the early s when it won a design award from Apple. Designers love Sketch because its uncluttered and intuitive interface makes it easy to create beautiful designs quickly, without the steep learning curve often associated with other design tools. Sketch also has a comprehensive ecosystem of plugins and integrations that bring added power and make it simple to integrate Sketch into your workflow.
Sketch offers a free, full-featured, day trial. Visit Sketch. Tired of being beaten out by simpler tools that were better-suited to interface design and prototyping, Adobe released XD in as its answer to the other tools on this list.
XD is a powerful, vector-based tool that also supports prototyping animations. The program also supports opening and editing files from Sketch, making it a popular choice for Windows users who need to collaborate with other designers who use Sketch. DreamHost is an officially recommended host by the WordPress team. Bluehost offers three main price points, depending on the contract length that you choose. At the time of writing this review, Bluehost has one of the easiest to use dashboards of all web hosts.
Everything is simple to find, and each site you own has a separate section with all the options shown neatly in the panel.
The metric where they also excel at is uptime, coming in with an average of They host more than two million websites, so they certainly have experience. Apart from that, you also get unlimited emails, a free domain name for the first year, and both disk space and bandwidth are unmetered. This makes it a great plan for small niche websites. The user panel at iPage is not as easy to navigate as some of its competitors. While you can perform basic tasks on your setup, the options seem limited.
You get access to their website builder tool, which allows you to launch a site quickly. HostGator remains to be one of the most popular web hosting firms, and their affordable prices have something to do with that. HostGator is set on giving you all the tools required to launch a single website.
They give you access to two main panels on the back end. Apart from that, you can enter cPanel for more advanced settings. HostGator also invites you to use their website builder tool, which is meant for beginners and is quite approachable. HostGator has shown some excellent results both in speed and uptime. Their average loading time is ms on average and uptime is even better — This means that during the past 12 months, HostGator managed to keep up our test site without any bigger outages and downtime.
Overall, HostGator can be a good starting point for you if you want to launch a new site quickly. First, the most unexpected thing is that you cannot buy just the hosting plan without buying a domain name from them as well. While One. Particularly, there are no one-click installers for website scripts like WordPress, and their website builder only allows creating up to five pages.
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