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Anyone Used Godaddy Website Builder?
#1

Anyone Used Godaddy Website Builder?

I was just curious if anyone has ever used the Godaddy website builder and shopping cart for a website or site and ecommerce store?

I know wordpress is better, I setup a site years ago before I got onto wordpress and just continued renewing it, its not my primary site but actually ranks fairly well on google which surprised me.

I also had a question. WHen laying out hte design of the site it uses these "blocks" of content. It's somewhat confusing as oftentimes when I try to make changes it screws up the whole formatting. I'm not the most tech saavy person so hoping someone can answer a few questions for me.

First off does anyone know what kind of program they use for their site builder is it like xml or html or? Is it possible for me to get someone to design a template I can just upload and not worry about making these blocks myself?

Lastly, would any web designer or graphic designer do this for me or would people not want to work on a template godaddy site?Basically I'm looking to get someone to make the homepage for me and possibly just rework the whole site to make it a bit more professional and less template looking. I have a wordpress site and am in the process of building another so I know I'll probably get suggestions like switch to wordpress but I have one and getting another built, still want to keep this godaddy site live though.

Thanks
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#2

Anyone Used Godaddy Website Builder?

Make your life simple bro and use the wordpress framework for your website. There are loads of free and premium 'themes' you can choose from, depending on the function of your site.
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#3

Anyone Used Godaddy Website Builder?

It really depends on what you are doing with the site and if you have an established 'brand' or not

Is it a "static" site or a "rolling" blog?

if its a rolling blog - use wordpress or Joomla! (my site)
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#4

Anyone Used Godaddy Website Builder?

Quote: (10-17-2014 02:27 PM)good looking loser Wrote:  

It really depends on what you are doing with the site and if you have an established 'brand' or not

Is it a "static" site or a "rolling" blog?

if its a rolling blog - use wordpress or Joomla! (my site)

It's actually an ecommerce site. I started out super shitty with a blogspot site with Paypal buttons to process transactions. Some friends were like wow your actually doing pretty good sales for having such a shit unprofessional looking site you should really up your game and see where you can take this so from that I morphed to a godaddy template site with godaddy shopping cart.

From there I outsourced my web design to an Indian company who built a wordpress site. At first I was very happy but when problems with the site would arise they were slow on fixing them and are now ignoring me. I have been calling around some local companies looking to get a site made. One guy quoted me 20k, got a quote from a marketing web design company out in california at $3900. I just recently spoke with a local company who wants to charge 5k which is a bit more than I want to spend but I'm relaly impressed with the project manager so tempted to go with them.

I still wanted to keep this godaddy site up as a backup incase my site runs into any problems, I had some like russion facebook page takeover my server a while back and have had other problems iwht my site so like the idea that I have a backup running on another domain I can refer people to incase of emergencies or site going down.
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#5

Anyone Used Godaddy Website Builder?

Use wordpress. Unless you ARE ready to pay big bucks (like 5k+) you're never going to get the site looking how you want it. You can learn wordpress really well in about 30-40 hours. There are lots of plugins that make things easy. You could use woocommerce for your shopping cart.

Instead of templates use Visual Composer with a really really basic theme to design your own site from the ground up

I made the mistake of paying a web design firm - actually the best in my town - $3000 for a website and they build some shitty looking wordpress site that I spent 50 hours myself making look professional. Needless to say, I'm not a fan of most web design firms & I like that now I know how to do it so I can create any site on my own relatively easily without paying some chumps in the future.

Youtube is your friend for learning WP, Visual Composer and all the other additional plugins.
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#6

Anyone Used Godaddy Website Builder?

It's 5k vs. pocket change.

I would first go with Wordpress, spend 30-40 hours with it like Monster said and if you still feel that your site isn't where you want it to be, then plunk down the money.
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#7

Anyone Used Godaddy Website Builder?

I've used wordpress, go daddy, and wix.

In building an e-commerce site, Wix would be my go-to, just based on the ease of integrating everything. You can make a pretty kick ass site on there for relatively cheap, and it'll look professionally done.

"Money over bitches, nigga stick to the script." - Jay-Z
They gonna love me for my ambition.
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#8

Anyone Used Godaddy Website Builder?

Please don't use anything GoDaddy. They are a shit company. I remember last time I couldn't install certain common software because they disable a common *nix function. But I paid for the fucking hosting. It got me angry that I don't want to deal with them ever.
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#9

Anyone Used Godaddy Website Builder?

I don't understand the hate for GoDaddy. The start-up I'm in uses everything from Go-Daddy and it works perfectly well... Website Builder is intuitive and easy to use for people who don't know shit about Web Development. Customer service has been great to us.
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#10

Anyone Used Godaddy Website Builder?

Quote: (10-18-2014 09:41 PM)monster Wrote:  

Use wordpress. Unless you ARE ready to pay big bucks (like 5k+) you're never going to get the site looking how you want it. You can learn wordpress really well in about 30-40 hours. There are lots of plugins that make things easy. You could use woocommerce for your shopping cart.

Instead of templates use Visual Composer with a really really basic theme to design your own site from the ground up

I made the mistake of paying a web design firm - actually the best in my town - $3000 for a website and they build some shitty looking wordpress site that I spent 50 hours myself making look professional. Needless to say, I'm not a fan of most web design firms & I like that now I know how to do it so I can create any site on my own relatively easily without paying some chumps in the future.

Youtube is your friend for learning WP, Visual Composer and all the other additional plugins.

Web design is a tricky field because a lot of it is subjective with regards to taste. Very few people actually have that good eye for design, I certainly don't and even if you're an expert on css and html, that isn't a guarantee that you can create a great looking site. There are also trends in web design, looks that are fresh and it can be subtle. For example there's a sort of minimalist trend recently using blocky design and cool pastel color schemes. Web design gets outdated very quickly too.

I'd rather find a graphical designer first with skills and creativity. Let them design a template in photoshop, then find someone else to convert it to Wordpress. You rarely find a great designer who codes, and you rarely find a great coder who designs. Having both in a smaller agency is also rare.
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#11

Anyone Used Godaddy Website Builder?

Quote: (10-20-2014 12:02 PM)berserk Wrote:  

Quote: (10-18-2014 09:41 PM)monster Wrote:  

Use wordpress. Unless you ARE ready to pay big bucks (like 5k+) you're never going to get the site looking how you want it. You can learn wordpress really well in about 30-40 hours. There are lots of plugins that make things easy. You could use woocommerce for your shopping cart.

Instead of templates use Visual Composer with a really really basic theme to design your own site from the ground up

I made the mistake of paying a web design firm - actually the best in my town - $3000 for a website and they build some shitty looking wordpress site that I spent 50 hours myself making look professional. Needless to say, I'm not a fan of most web design firms & I like that now I know how to do it so I can create any site on my own relatively easily without paying some chumps in the future.

Youtube is your friend for learning WP, Visual Composer and all the other additional plugins.

Web design is a tricky field because a lot of it is subjective with regards to taste. Very few people actually have that good eye for design, I certainly don't and even if you're an expert on css and html, that isn't a guarantee that you can create a great looking site. There are also trends in web design, looks that are fresh and it can be subtle. For example there's a sort of minimalist trend recently using blocky design and cool pastel color schemes. Web design gets outdated very quickly too.

I'd rather find a graphical designer first with skills and creativity. Let them design a template in photoshop, then find someone else to convert it to Wordpress. You rarely find a great designer who codes, and you rarely find a great coder who designs. Having both in a smaller agency is also rare.

Yep experiences like that aren't rare.

When hiring a web design firm you need to be thorough in vetting them.

A couple of quick points to think about-

What is the quality of their average website?


If you think they're only putting the best websites on their portfolio, use a tool like Open Site Explorer or Ahrefs to see the sites that link to them. Most web design companies put a footer link in sites they design, so that's a great way to check out their actual work and not what they cherry pick to use on their portfolio.

Check their work to see if it's up to date. That's hugely important, don't hire someone who's stuck in the past and will make your website look dated on launch day.

Do they know how to code?


There are plenty of freelance "web designers" out there who don't know much coding and simply modify a Wordpress or Squarspace template. This will mean they will lack the ability to truly customize the website, and that the website won't perform perform nearly as well as it could. They typically charge around 500-1000$ a site, hence why I wouldn't take quotes in that range seriously unless its for a very simple personal or business site. A friend of mine charges 500$ for simple Wordpress websites. They serve a purpose but they are very limited in functionality, and he can't really modify them too much. He doesn't know much coding.

Do they have a good grasp of traffic generation and conversion optimization?

This is huge. You want to hire a firm that knows how traffic is generated and is aware of how to optimize a website for conversions(i.e ensure there's a call to action, easily accessible contact info, etc.). SEO knowledge is important too.

They must know how to optimize your site to load fast, as page load speed is important. A slow website ranks lower on Google's search engines, and is more likely to result in people clicking off your page.

How is their Project Management and Customer Service?


Email a couple of their former clients and see what they say. The most recent client I had emailed in one of our former clients, and our former client gave us a glowing review which resulted in closing the deal.
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#12

Anyone Used Godaddy Website Builder?

Quote: (10-18-2014 10:44 AM)jamaicabound Wrote:  

Quote: (10-17-2014 02:27 PM)good looking loser Wrote:  

It really depends on what you are doing with the site and if you have an established 'brand' or not

Is it a "static" site or a "rolling" blog?

if its a rolling blog - use wordpress or Joomla! (my site)

It's actually an ecommerce site. I started out super shitty with a blogspot site with Paypal buttons to process transactions. Some friends were like wow your actually doing pretty good sales for having such a shit unprofessional looking site you should really up your game and see where you can take this so from that I morphed to a godaddy template site with godaddy shopping cart.

From there I outsourced my web design to an Indian company who built a wordpress site. At first I was very happy but when problems with the site would arise they were slow on fixing them and are now ignoring me. I have been calling around some local companies looking to get a site made. One guy quoted me 20k, got a quote from a marketing web design company out in california at $3900. I just recently spoke with a local company who wants to charge 5k which is a bit more than I want to spend but I'm relaly impressed with the project manager so tempted to go with them.

I still wanted to keep this godaddy site up as a backup incase my site runs into any problems, I had some like russion facebook page takeover my server a while back and have had other problems iwht my site so like the idea that I have a backup running on another domain I can refer people to incase of emergencies or site going down.

OP, definitely invest in your website because you'll need a trustworthy looking website that runs smoothly for e-commerce. A quality website conveys legitimacy and builds trust, while a mediocre website is going to make the consumer far more wary of doing business with you. 5,000$ isn't nothing for a e-commerce website, especially if you scale up and are making many times.

Shoot me a PM. I run a digital marketing agency and a big part of what we do is web design. I'll take a look at your situation and give you some recommendations. I'm also well versed in SEO so I can give you some tips on that.
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#13

Anyone Used Godaddy Website Builder?

Quote: (10-18-2014 09:41 PM)monster Wrote:  

Use wordpress. Unless you ARE ready to pay big bucks (like 5k+) you're never going to get the site looking how you want it. You can learn wordpress really well in about 30-40 hours. There are lots of plugins that make things easy. You could use woocommerce for your shopping cart.

Instead of templates use Visual Composer with a really really basic theme to design your own site from the ground up

I made the mistake of paying a web design firm - actually the best in my town - $3000 for a website and they build some shitty looking wordpress site that I spent 50 hours myself making look professional. Needless to say, I'm not a fan of most web design firms & I like that now I know how to do it so I can create any site on my own relatively easily without paying some chumps in the future.

Youtube is your friend for learning WP, Visual Composer and all the other additional plugins.

$3,000 is absolutely nothing for a website. I'm a web designer at a marketing agency. We don't even touch anything under $5000 as we'd lose our ass on it. And even then, the only reason it's profitable is because these are ongoing SEO and marketing clients who continue to pay monthly for ongoing marketing services and the web design is essentially the gateway. People who go acting like they are getting ripped off for paying $3000 for a site have no idea what goes into hiring a professional and the process behind it. Sure anyone can slap together a wordpress site in a day that looks like shit, but do you know to do keyword research for your area on google analytics and write SEO content that's going to drive traffic? Do you know how to decrease bounce rates? Do you know how to properly use H1, H2, H3 tags so that they boost your search engine ranking, do you know how make a website responsive for every screen dimension size possible from 30 inch monitors to 3" phones and still look consistent? Do you know to serve different images to different devices to slash loading times? Do you have all the equipment to test your site on to make sure it's rendering right across Mac, Windows, Android and IOS and in all versions of browsers on those platforms? We use wordpress frameworks too, and most of them are full of bugs, even the popular ones that we have to do custom coding to workaround things to accommodate someone's design. My point is, there's a lot of work and testing that goes into making a quality product. And if someone gets a well designed, bug-free, SEO-ready site for $3000, they got a damn good deal. Just because you CAN put a site together yourself doesn't mean you know what you're doing. I can buy a book and learn how to redo my bathroom, but that doesn't mean it's something I'm going to enjoy doing or even be good at. It would probably be a pain in the ass if that's not my background. I think the same is true for web design.


Another reason to just hire someone is that they are going to do it better and more efficiently than you can. If you run a business, that 40 hours you spent learning wordpress was an opportunity cost. If it took you two weeks to learn, that's two weeks you could've been out making sales and marketing your product. Even one new client might've earned you more money than whatever you saved by going the cheap route on wordpress. Plus consider the fact that a website might be good for 3 years before being redesigned. That $3000 is an upfront cost, but amortized over three years that only amounts $83/month. If done right, that website will have brought you far in excess of $83 a month of business. So the $3000 is really chump change.


Quote:Quote:

One guy quoted me 20k, got a quote from a marketing web design company out in california at $3900.

Prices can be all over the place. Just like hiring a lawyer. Some are going to be cheap ambulance chasers, some are high powered attorneys who only serve fortune 500 companies and you could never afford. There's no way to even gauge what a fair price for a website is. It's like asking what's the fair price to hire a lawyer, or what's a fair price to pay for a car. It depends on that company's reputation, what kind of clients they have and exactly what they do.

A site like Wix may be fine for bubba's chicken wing shack or some no-name band that needs to slap together a site, but no serious business would even think of using a drag and drop template to create a site. You don't even own the site. You couldn't take your files and move them to a different server because it's built on their proprietary software, so if you stop paying your bills or they can't charge your credit card, your site disappears.

Edit--

Case in point, someone I've worked with in the past emailed me because his client says they no longer show up on the first page on google searches. They had their website redesigned. The new designer clearly had no knowledge of how to maintain their SEO and carry it over to the new build. When the new site launched, they lose all that and their page ranking tanked. That's the kind of stuff that happens when you hire a $500 designer in India. That $2,000 he saved as an upfront cost might have cost him who knows how many clients because they fell off the search rankings. He probably LOST money by going to the cheaper guy. That's the kind of big picture shit people need to think about. A website is an investment more than it is a cost, because if done right, it should be making you money while you sleep. Money far in excess of what you paid for it.
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#14

Anyone Used Godaddy Website Builder?

I have a question here, as someone who knows next to nothing about web design. What do you guys mean when you say to use the wordpress framework?

Example:

I have registered solo.com

If I go the wordpress route, would that mean making do with solo.wordpress.com

or

keeping solo.com but somehow transferring the wordpress framework onto this site?

Does one need any knowledge in things like coding to make his own, very basic, website?

Right now I don't have any money to spend on a site. If my income starts picking up in the future I will consider it, but right now i don't have a choice. I just need a site to publish posts/articles and build upon.
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#15

Anyone Used Godaddy Website Builder?

Check out site5.

Its got a lot of what godaddy has BUT, amazing support. It was recommended to me from an IT buddy of mine because out of the handful of hosts with sitebuilders he has used, site5 gave him the most timely and effective support whenever he needed it.
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