which website platform should you use?
february 24, 2021
Category: design
which website platform is best for your brand?
A website is sooooo important to help extend your brand online and communicate with your audience about what you offer. We want to give your audience an amazing first impression and that starts with selecting the best website platform for your business. So, what platforms are out there and why do we choose the ones we do?
It’s one of the questions I get all. the. time. — which website platforms do I use and why. At one point or another, I’ve worked with just about every platform out there which has given me some pretty great insights into which platforms are best for my clients and which they should steer clear of. At Brighten Made, we primarily use two platforms — Squarespace and Shopify — depending on the goals and needs for the client’s website. So let’s dive in — why do we recommend these platforms? And which platforms do we try to avoid?
first up, squarespace
Squarespace has been my day one. It was the first website platform I used and it’s stuck with me for 8+ years! I built my first portfolio on Squarespace and it’s what my current website (that you’re looking at now) is on.
I recommend Squarespace for most small business owners who have a service-based businesses. I love Squarespace because of its super user-friendly interface which allows my clients to easily update text and images after the process is over. At the same time, we’re able to get a super custom, branded look without paying for a developer to code it from scratch. Squarespace allows you to blog, sell products online, and give more information about your services — everything a service-based business owner could need!
Are you a designer and interested in learning more about Squarespace? Here are a few resources!
Squarestylist
W3 Schools for HTML/CSS
next, shopify
This one is for my e-commerce brands! While you can sell products on Squarespace, Shopify is a much more robust platform and will be a game changer for your product-based business. If your goal is to solely sell products online, I can’t recommend Shopify enough.
The design capabilities in Shopify are a bit more limited than Squarespace, but I’ve found a lot of work-arounds to give my clients the custom look they’re wanting. Typically, most of my clients start with a theme from Shopify’s theme store. Then we tweak it and customize it to fit their brand and overall aesthetic. We also use apps for certain features that we aren’t able to achieve through the theme or we partner with a developer to make a few tweaks to the theme in order to implement certain functionality that they’re needing.
There’s also the option to build completely from scratch and partner with a developer, however, that can add another $20k+ onto the overall investment so it’s not a common route to go!
Are you a designer and interested in learning more about Shopify?
Here’s a course I took: Amplify Shopify
last but not least, wordpress
And last but not least, the occasional Wordpress site. I don’t personally develop Wordpress sites. Instead, I’ll do the design and hand that off to a developer to make it come to life.
Wordpress sites are great for bloggers and sites that are more content driven than your typical small business or product-based website. I’ve worked with bloggers in the past who have had to migrate over from Squarespace to Wordpress in order to have a faster platform to host all of their content.
Here’s a look at a recent Wordpress site I worked on with Garvin + Co.
but what about showit?
If you’ve made it this far and you’re familiar with other website hosting platforms, you might be thinking, but Bri, you didn’t mention Showit! To be transparent, I have worked with Showit before, but I don’t necessarily prefer it. If you’re not familiar with Showit, it’s a drag and drop website platform where you can quite literally design websites however you want with no coding required!
While the drag and drop feature is amazing, there are a few reasons why I’ve chosen to *USUALLY* not work on Showit sites. The first being, I feel like it gives the client a little too much control. The purpose of working with a website designer is not to have to re-design your website after the process is over! I want my clients to feel confident in using their site, but not feel like they can or should entirely rearrange it.
The second reason is the limit of pixels. Each site is set to 1200px wide on desktop. While that is a safe assumption for most screens, I still wish I had creative control to set the site width depending on the client. And lastly, going along with reason number one, I wish there was a way to make things feel less floaty. In my experience, I feel like the design can quickly become not aligned, and as a designer who strives to make everything feel balanced, that is my personal nightmare (lol being overly dramatic).
All this to say, I don’t want to rag on Showit or say you shouldn’t use it because I absolutely think it’s an amazing platform and there are a LOT of pros to using it, especially if the thought of coding makes your head spin. I’ve just personally chosen to use Squarespace over Showit for my small business owners, but that’s not to say I’m against it.
I hope this little behind the scenes of my web process was helpful! Comment below if you have any questions.
