by Guy Bolt

Created on: October 14, 2010   Last Updated: October 16, 2010

There are plenty of reasons why you may want to have a website. Perhaps you want to write your own personal blog to get your thoughts out to the world. Maybe you have a business and you would like to attract a global audience to buy your goods and services.  Who knows? There are a hundred different reasons why you may want to build your own website, and they are all pretty good ones. However, how will you make your website? Unless you are a technical wizard, a free website builder or a

website template may be one of your best options. Should you rely on one?  Let’s discuss the matter.

For many people, something that allows you to build your own website without any real technical expertise or ability is kind of a mystery. People do not seem to know what these builders can do for them, or in some cases, that they even exist! Let’s discuss a bit about what a free website builder is, and what it can do to help you get your website off the ground. Along the way, you will probably be able to determine pretty accurately whether it is the right way for you to go.

What a website builder does is simplify the process of building a website, mostly by taking all of the programming language out of the equation. Usually, when someone builds a website, they do at least a sizable portion of it through programming, just by entering the correct commands and what not into a text box. However, if you aren’t familiar with doing so, this is a very intimidating endeavor. What website builders do is allow you to use “what you see is what you get” designing, which de-mystifies the whole experience and makes it much more user friendly.

“What you see is what you get” is actually a very simple concept, as it sounds just like what it is. It means that to move something to one side of the page or another, you just drag or click it over, and you get visual feedback that shows you how your new page layout looks. Everything is done in that sort of way, meaning that you don’t need to be a programmer. This is a very good asset that is included in many web designing programs, such as Dreamweaver.

What those programs can’t give you that a free website builder can is the price- which is no price at all! Many of these website builders use what are called “templates”, which are pre-formatted website layouts that you can customize with your own images, text and other specifics, but that retain their basic form as you do. This allows the website that hosts the builder to provide the resources you need without having to actually assist you with the programming like a professional designer would have to. Furthermore, it gives you a sense of ownership, even though you will be working with a website that is already partially designed. Think of the templates as a skeleton, and you are filling the skeleton out with your own specific parts.

There are a lot of reasons to give a free website builder a chance. You can still customize your site to a large degree, you can personalize things without having to have a ton of programming knowledge (or any, honestly), and best of all, it’s free! However, since there are a lot of different sites that offer these services, you may want to look around before you invest a lot of time in one site rather than the other.

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