Best Small Business Website Design tool

I have been creating small websites since the late 1990s. Over the years, I used several website design tools. In 2014 I started to use Weebly and I am still convinced it is the best small business website design tool. Here is why.

Note: I am a Weebly reseller and I receive a small commission when referring a new customer. But similar commission systems are available from their competitors. I did not get paid by Weebly to write this article.

By Alain Houle, Alco Web Design LLC

Best Small Business Website Design tool

​WordPress is the most popular website design tool

​No doubt, WordPress is the most popular and most powerful tool to create websites. WordPress is an open system that everybody can modify. Experts abound and offer thousands of options and plugins that allow web designers to do about anything. You name it, it is there. This is the bright side of WordPress.

But with abundance and flexibility comes complexity. At the end, all the WordPress bells and whistles end up living inside your website and there is no guarantee that they will all play well together. Since WordPress is an open system, there no owner and no support desk. I had the pleasure to help customers with totally hosed up WordPress websites that nobody seems to be able to fix. This is the dark side of WordPress.

​Weebly is the best small business website design tool

​Weebly is more or less a locked down version of WordPress, offering far less, but enough options and plugins to meet the needs of most small business owners. The source code and the plugins all come from Weebly and this guarantees their quality and compatibility. Tech support is available from Weebly and, if needed, HTML blocks are available to support special functions. Weebly powers more than 40 million websites: It is not a toy. After using Weebly on hundreds of websites, I am still convinced Weebly is the best website design tool when creating small business websites.

Here is something we don't hear about often: Another advantage over WordPress is that Weebly is a hosted system. This means that all the Weebly websites physically reside on Weebly servers. This also means that your setup is not unique and that Weebly is responsible for the configuration, functionality, and security issues that small business owners have no desire to deal with.

Even though I am a big Weebly fan, I don’t really like their templates that are, well, boring. This can easily be overcome by using a premium Weebly template from companies like Webfire Themes and Baamboo Studios. Those companies offer several exciting templates that will make your website look professional and stand out of the crowd. All Weebly premium templates come in with several customization options (colors, add/remove, fonts, custom code, etc.) to make your small business website unique. Some premium templates are very business specific (restaurants, photographers, etc.). Below are my preferred generic premium templates that do a nice job for most small business websites.

​From Webfire Themes
https://wft-aria.weebly.com
https://wft-jonah.weebly.com
https://wft-innovation.weebly.com
https://wft-velo.weebly.com
https://wft-hexagon.weebly.com
https://wft-bework.weebly.com
https://wft-kudos.weebly.com
​https://wft-optima2.weebly.com

​From Baamboo Studio
http://infinititemplate.weebly.com
http://linentemplate.weebly.com
https://findertemplate.weebly.com
http://stellatemplate.weebly.com
http://serenetemplate.weebly.com
http://seranadetemplate.weebly.com
http://pyramidtemplate.weebly.com

Alco Web Design provides website design services to small business owners interested by a professional and cost-effective presence on the web. Impress your potential customers with a stunning website from Alco Web Design! Contact us today to discuss your small business website design needs. You might be surprised by our methods and our prices.