Have you ever wondered if there is an easier way to build a website than what exists in the market today? Us too. We've looked high and low for website building software. Website software is only a fraction of the effort required to get a professional looking website. Listen to us talk about the good and bad of website building software. See what Semify is doing to streamline website development.
If that isn't enough for one video, check out how we believe Wordpress is the right software for building websites because of its large developer network and support.
Chad: Hello, and welcome to our website creation software video. I'm Chad Hill and I have Adam Stetzer with me as well.
Adam: We're diving deep into website creation software. We all get these solicitations for website building software, this amazing piece of technology that's going to make your life easier and launch a beautiful website. I want to start first off by just asking you, is that a myth? Does this website software really even exist?
Chad: I've never seen it. I mean, I've fallen for the great advertisements and thought that this thing was going to make building websites super easy. I've tried all of the website building software, they all kind of come off as simplistic and ultimately fail, especially when you try to add things down the road.
So for that reason, one of the things that we did our due diligence, many times, several years ago. But we have always come back to the same conclusion that WordPress is really the best website building software for a small business, and actually in a lot of cases, even for bigger cases.
Adam: Right.
Chad: But I think the great thing about WordPress is that it's very well supported, and that there are - I just looked this up on the wordpress.org site - 60 million websites running WordPress today. So the community that's there and the momentum it has, it's so good and so big that it's really not worth looking anywhere else and looking for any other silver bullets, because WordPress is the way you want to go.
Adam: All right, so you've decided that WordPress is the website creation software of choice. So you do your install, your MySQL. You've got your PHP server running, and you pick a theme and you think, "Oh, right. In five minutes I'm going to have a beautiful, professional looking website." It can't be that easy, right?
Chad: Yeah. I think that's where the easy software for website construction myth ends, because you're looking at the the WordPress interface, what do I do? Now there are thousands and thousands of themes out there. Once you have the platform, I think that's where you need a company that can help you pick the theme, and then ultimately take the theme.
Because, even if you do find a perfect theme, a lot of times just loading that up, the work it takes to size images correctly and to make sure that the images you load don't sort of conflict with otherwise the layout that you're buying, it looks nice, is more difficult than most beginners can handle.
So what you want is you want a company that can help you pick a theme as a foundation or as a platform, and then customize it or add in your own information so that it looks and works how you need it to work.
Adam: So put another way, I've seen a lot of really ugly WordPress websites. I'm sure you have too. So I guess in understanding how choosing this website building software will help you and where it won't help you, you have to understand that it will offload some of the simplistic stuff.
You'll get a blog pretty quickly and your navigation structure is there and you can add widgets. So there are some very maintenance-type development items that normally you have to do repetitively that picking a CMS like WordPress really does help. But I think people don't extrapolate, like you just said, Chad, to thinking, "I'll have a beautiful website without putting in any effort." That's just simply not true.
That's where - particularly if you're going to do these at volume or maybe you're an agency looking to offer web design - you either need to get these skills in-house to be very good with WordPress because it is just a tool set, or you need to find a partner who's going to help you do it. So I think that's our bottom line on how to select website creation software.