Free website builder platform is good for newbies

You like to have your own business, yeah? Unfortunately, a physical store is very expensive especially in a place like Hong Kong, and it is certainly a big barrier for newbie entrepreneurs to kick start their dream. Thanks to the advancement of technology, in 2020, everyone can start their online business easily by creating a website. Furthermore, there are plenty of free website builder platforms for us to use. For instance, Wix.com, Strikingly and Weebly is very popular website builders and all of them provide free plans for anyone to create a totally new website.

There are several advantages of free website builders.

First, they are free. Usually, a new entrepreneur is not with abundant capital and he or she should consider twice before spending every buck. A free website solution allows the newbies to start the online business with a very low initiating fund.

Second, a website builder is all ready for dummies. Register a new account, select a suitable template, place your company material and that is. You don’t need to know web design, you don’t need to know web development, and you even don’t need to know any coding. Click and go, you can have a good website within minutes. This content management system (CMS) is really great for website dummies.

Last, website builders are cloud-based and this means there is no installation on a local computer. We don’t even need to maintain a high-cost server nor know how to assure the performance of a complex machine.

The limitation of free website builder platform

Everything looks good, however, there are still limitations of these free website builders and you will find out that these technical barriers could probably block your online business from growing.

One straightforward limitation of website builders is that they allow very limited customization only. You can hardly edit any lines of code. Do you want to style the website layout? Sorry, this is not possible. Most animation effects are done with CSS and Javascript (Web programming language), this implies that your free website cannot have any customized animation to attract users.

Moreover, website builders usually serve as a proprietorship software service. They are closed systems, and users cannot export the website to other service providers. There are of course some exceptions, for example, the WordPress.org service, nevertheless, you need to pay an amount to migrate the website away from it. Usually, website builders offer as a package that we cannot ask for customized functions, either. It is absolutely not a tool for web development.

One very limitation of free website builders for us as a web designer is that these builders are not SEO-friendly. Technically, certain content of a website from a website platform is generated by coding, and this is quite difficult for search engines to crawl and assimilate the website. Search engines will not rank these websites high and you cannot have good exposure to the potential market.

Why do you need an SEO-friendly website?

Starting from the very original idea, the purpose to build a website is to increase popularity and enhance the brand. There is a number of online marketing channels namely social media marketing, search engine marketing and so on. One of the mainstream methods is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). We call a website optimized for search engines as “SEO-friendly”. An SEO-friendly website allows major search engines, for example, Google and Bing to understand it thoroughly. Once the search engine matches your website content and users’ intention, it will show your website links on the return pages. A search is free, and an organic ranking is also free. It is a long-run economic marketing method. If you do pay search, a good SEO will also result in a lower cost.

Hong Kong web design company good for you

pnetform (the Hong Kong web design company) agrees that a free website builder platform could be a good solution to new entrepreneurs with a tight budget. Once the business grows up and you might encounter a bottleneck to further. This is the moment you should consider hiring a web design company to revamp your website. We already discussed in another article why you should find a Hong Kong web design company if you target the local market.

Life in 2020 is so challenging for both individuals and enterprises. If your business is morphing from a bud to an enterprise, prepare a budget and time to consult a webmaster such as pnetform to go further online. Building your own website is not that expensive if you have the granted subsidy from the Technology Voucher Programme by the HKSAR Government. Contact us for more information. ([email protected])