Everybody has a website these days. Whether you’re a teenager who wants to bare your soul to the world, or a grandma who wants a place where she can post the nuggets of wisdom collected throughout her life, or a small mom and pop shop that needs to build an online presence – you are going to need to create website.
You can always hire someone to create website for you, but if you belong to the groups of people mentioned above, chances are you don’t have the budget to hire a website builder or designer to create website because they command ridiculously high rates, which is on top of the expenses you already have to shoulder when it comes to buying hosting and domain names.
More often than not, your only option is to create website on your own using whatever software or tool you can get your hands on. The problem is that the design and coding skills needed in order to produce a good-looking, functional website are not easy to come by on your own. There is a reason why the aforementioned website developers command such high rates – they have a specialized skill to create website. Fortunately for non-techy novices like us, there is a free website builder called BlueVoda that can help create professional-looking websites even if you don’t have any coding skills.
The value proposition of this website builder is fairly unbelievable at first – it boasts that it can help people create website in 30 minutes or less. While I do expect that to be hyperbole meant to entice customers who want to create website, upon further use I realized that it is kind of true. Assuming that you are an experienced website builder, BlueVoda can help you create website within minutes. Of course, it is going to be the bare minimum needed for a website to be called a website, but it is a great place to start. This website builder can be used to tweak it further and turn it into something that looks like a million dollars.
But those are for people who have the necessary skill to be a website builder and designer. What about the rest of us who don’t know a single line of HTML code to create website? Well, it turns out that BlueVoda is still a great website builder for us. It won’t allow you to create website in 30 minutes, and you shouldn’t expect it to. It is designed to guide novices, and you know what they say about handholding novices – slowly but surely.
With regard to features, this website builder seems to have everything that’s needed for your basic but beautiful website. It uses a WYSIWYG editor so there’s no need to fiddle with HTML codes to create website. If you know how to use Windows, Word or PowerPoint, you have all the necessary skills to learn how to use the drag and drop interface of this website builder. That is not to say that it’s useless to people who prefer hard coding, because there’s also enough advanced features to give advanced users what they want.
In fact, there are advanced features that can help create website with impressive functionalities. The widgets support of this website builder let you do some pretty cool stuff like add videos and multimedia content, and lets you plug in various third party functionalities such as a shopping cart or a server-side guestbook.
The website builder also comes with a good, heaping dose of ready to use templates, so even those who are not confident with their design skills can still create website that look great. Just get one of the templates, tweak a few things here and there and voila! You have your own professional-looking website!
Getting the website you create uploaded is straightforward because the website builder is seamlessly integrated with the VodaHost service. If you have a VodaHost plan, publishing a website is as easy as a few mouse clicks. Which brings me to the little important detail about the price and its connection of this website builder to the VodaHost service.
The price is free – you can’t beat free, right? But it is worth noting that there is a catch. This website builder is free, but only for subscribers to VodaHost. You basically need to subscribe to the hosting service and BlueVoda ties in to that. It’s not a big problem because if you plan to create website, chances are you need hosting as well. VodaHost is pretty decent as far as hosting providers are concerned; they have affordable rates and the customer support is top notch. But people who already have their own hosting accounts might find that they need to double dip. Either way, this website builder is really worth that minor quibble especially if you want everything consolidated into a single service when you create website.