Let’s say you have a successful business, or you’re a hard-working individual who wants to show their work to more people. How do you do it? The easy answer is, build a website. The harder answer is, how do you build a website? You need an easy website builder, preferably one that’s free to try.
Here at VOOG, we think we might have the answer. Let us show you what we mean, by taking you through a few basics of website building, and how you can use our unique templates to create your own great site in 15 minutes.
Disclaimer: the author may work for VOOG, but he’s spent many unhappy hours wrestling with his low technical skills and the WordPress dashboard, while contributing to a shared WordPress site.
Publish your VOOG website in only 15 minutes!
What’s great about an easy website builder?
As you probably know, the majority of people wanting an easy website builder go to either a point-and-click blog platform like Tumblr, or to WordPress. While both of these solutions may seem great on the outset, there are reasons to be cautious. Let’s take a look at some of the most popular instant fixes for people needing a website that is pre-designed, and why they don’t work for businesses.Why some blogging platforms don’t work for businesses
When we think of simple blogging platforms, sites like Medium, Tumblr, Typepad, and many others spring to mind. They are designed with maximum simplicity and minimum fuss in mind. For this reason, they may well be appealing to people with limited time and a long to-do list. However, it might be worth you shopping around elsewhere.Simple platforms on which you can just sign up, pick a background (if that), insert a few images and then start writing are all well and good, but there’s an issue at stake here: flexibility. Most of the sites don’t offer more than one or two standard templates, with Medium going even further in only offering the one page setup, being more for longform writing than presentation. If you’re an author who just wants their words online and no frills, then Medium might be a good fit for you (learn more about Medium here).
If you want to do a bit more with your online business shop-front, you need to go elsewhere.
Tumblr is a similar story, except it at least offers a great way to post images. It’s for this reason that it has long been one of the first choices of, for example, young people who want to use a site as an online moodboard. The problem with it is that it doesn’t have a very professional reputation; seen more as a place for amateur hobby-sites, you’re unlikely to get much business cachet through using it.
The other problem is that both of the sites we’ve mentioned above are specifically for blogging, or at least they are designed for a continuous stream of posts. What about if you want to put up a cool landing page, or really sell your business through a great photo to greet potential customers? If you use one of those platforms, this is not impossible, but it is difficult and requires a lot of adaptation of something not meant for that purpose.
Easy website, easy work, easy life
When people visit a business website, what they’re looking for is how you can help them, and how much it costs. Put this front and centre on your website, and you’re a long way towards the success you are looking for. Too many businesses focus too much on the peripheral stuff, the interesting stories about things that happen at the company. It’s fun and entertaining, but for visitors to want to read that, you have to first engage them with your product.We think that VOOG can offer you the templates you need in order to increase your customer engagement. That’s because VOOG’s unique templates are deliberately simple, giving you just what you need, but not trying to overcomplicate your value proposition with too many extras. They’re designed by business experts, for businesses, are just the ticket, and will keep you focused on your goals.
An easy website builder: your flexible friend
There are lots of reasons for choosing an easy website builder and hosting provider. Getting everything in one package, and only having to attach a custom domain if need be, is going to free up a lot of time. If you have a business to run, you can’t afford to spend time messing around with banners, perfecting that sliding video landing page, and coming up with 75 different sub-pages.What’s more, your efforts might be lost on the customers, who may either be put off by an overly glossy look, or, if you’re, say, a restaurant with multiple pages detailing different parts of the menu, you might well find that people don’t bother to click that far. An easy website builder with online store templates, like VOOG offers, along with full e-commerce support, will mean you can take your retail business to the next level without frying your brain in the process.
There is another thing: Google, and optimising your website to get to the top of searches (the practice known as SEO or search engine optimisation, also covering other indexes like Bing), is one of the hot-button topics of the moment. This is because Google keeps changing its algorithm to make search results more relevant to the user. The latest thing Google has done is tweak the algorithm to favour websites that are set up to work on mobiles.
WordPress sites are not, as standard, optimised for mobiles. This means you probably have to purchase an additional template, and maybe even a plugin of some kind, to get your site looking good on smartphones and tablets. That isn’t a problem VOOG shares, with mobile optimisation coming as standard on all of our templates.
An easy website builder for teachers: a case study
Teachers are increasingly viewing themselves as offering a business service - this is especially true for private language teachers, and for business trainers who take their seminars and workshops from office to office. In order to not only survive but also thrive as a private teacher, it’s necessary to have a website. It doesn’t have to be fancy, it just has to say what you do, how much it would cost, and how it is possible to contact you.Here at VOOG, we think we’ve got the perfect template for teachers: Rotterdam. It’s a classic look, with plenty of white space to draw the eyes to what is really important, but it also looks great alongside any modern website. Often when companies and individuals are looking for teachers, they’re looking for a simple value proposition: can this person make me better at the thing he or she teaches? If you use Rotterdam or a similar template, you can keep your teaching website laser-focused on answering that question.
Why is an easy website builder better than Wordpress?
We’ve written a whole blog post previously on why we believe VOOG is a better product than WordPress when it comes to producing great results in a short amount of time. We won’t repeat ourselves, but suffice to say that WordPress can be a nightmare if you have anything else to do with your day.Not only does the free-hosting WordPress.com option restrict the amount of commercial activity you can undertake, it and its buy-your-own-hosting alternative WordPress.org require users to have a basic idea of how to use HTML code in order for them to be manipulated usefully. In addition, they tend to look pretty basic unless you spend a lot of time buffing and polishing your site. In addition to that they are giving new users precious little idea what to do or how to do it.
The WordPress dashboard can be a dark and lonely place on which to suffer
A personal note: I’ve had a bit of a nightmare at times on a shared WordPress site that I contribute to. This is for many reasons. The dashboard isn’t really built for new users to be able to navigate easily, the site was set up by someone who has since left the team, and if anything needs to be altered on the homepage, there’s complex sleight-of-hand to be performed with HTML code, something that makes me a little perplexed. With VOOG, everything is made easy for someone who isn’t a coder from birth, meaning the site is easily adaptable, whether you work solo or in a team.
VOOG, as soon as you log in for the first time, offers tutorials on how to do everything you could need to do initially. VOOG is an easy website builder using WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get), and this helps business owners and professionals by taking the guesswork out of building a website, its simple drag-and-drop interface giving users no difficulty when it comes to lining up pictures, text, and icons on their website.
Is VOOG the easy website builder you need?
To find out, set up and account for free and try our templates. We think you’ll be impressed with the results you can easily get in just 15 minutes, but if not, or if you have any questions about the best way to build a successful business website, contact our real, human, support team here in Tartu, Estonia - we’ll help you, whatever your question.Try VOOG for free
