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Web Dev

Website Builders

Since there are various needs when it comes to having and building a website I want to highlight that developing your own website might not always be the best option for your situation. There are various ways you can create a website.

The 3 main ways to build a website starting from more simple at the cost of customizability are:

  1. Website builders
  2. Content management systems (CMS)
  3. Custom coded

But even for each category there are a multitude of options that each have different use cases.

Overview of different website builders

Want to build your own online shop? ➡️ Shopify

Visual website builder that feels like Figma for designers ➡️ Webflow or Framer or builder.io

E-Mail newsletter based ➡️ Substack or Beehiiv or Buttondown

Very simple and very basic website ➡️ Google sites

Quite simple website builder ➡️ Hostinger Website Builder (Or Wix or Squarespace but they are more expensive)

I could continue this list almost endlessly but in summary the tools above will be better for you if you quickly need a website that you can maintain yourself without much expertise and upfront costs at the cost of customizability and things like ownership or search engine optimization (SEO).

Overview of different CMS

If you want to go a bit deeper and have a bit more control of your website you can use content management systems (CMS).

A popular CMS tool is WordPress but there are many others as well like Drupal or Ghost which is focussed on blogging.

For these tools you can already decide if you want to host them yourself or if you want to use the respective companies offerings.

Then there are options like Starlight or Nextra that can already belong to the custom coding category, but because of how simple they are I want to mention them here, they are both great tools to build a documentation style page like the one you are reading right now. Especially Starlight has been a joy to use for me.

Custom coding

If you want full control over your website you will have to go with coding it yourself.

Even when it comes to custom coding your own webpage there are many tools available. But at the core of every website lies HTML, CSS and JavaScript.