Everyone wants to have their piece of the internet these days. There are many platforms out there that can offer numerous options for building a social network, blog or website. But what are the most effective solutions fitting your primary needs and objectives?
1 Ning.com
Ning is a wonderful place to create your own blog or a social community of like-minded individuals. If your aim is creating a social network with the least effort just in a matter of a couple of hours, this is the best platform to do that. The Ning networks allow you to share all forms of content, including text, images, video, and music. Moreover, Ning supports multiple monetization options. Ning offers a free 14-day trial, so users can easily test the platform before going for a subscription plan.
2 WordPress
WordPress has both free and paid options to meet a variety of site building needs. The paid options allow for a lot more customization and offer numerous plugins for a wider array of features.
3 Blogger
Blogger is a free option available for creating a blog. It does include hosting, but you cannot get a custom domain. However, there are no plugins, and the selection of themes and designs is quite limited. Nevertheless, it is a great place to start because you don’t have to understand HTML to get started.
4 Weebly
Weebly is a free option that offers paid upgrades to build a social website. Plugins are limited, but there is a decent variety of design themes available.
5 Wix
Wix is another free platform for creating a social website or blog. Again, you can upgrade to a paid version and get access to additional features. You can also get a custom domain and a set of plugins for customization.
6 Squarespace
The subscription price of Squarespace ranges from $8 to $24 per month. There are over 100 plugins to customize your site, but the number of themes is limited. It also takes a little more work to make it SEO and social friendly than the other platforms.
7 Tumblr
Tumblr is completely free and fairly user-friendly. You don’t get your own custom domain and there are no plugins, but hosting is included, and it is social friendly right out of the box.
8 Yola
Yola lets you have two sites and up to three pages on its free plan, however, you do get a full 1 GB of storage and bandwidth, which is a generous amount for a free plan. Apart from this, it doesn’t throw a ton of irritating third-party ads at you.
9 Contentful
Contentful is one of its kind. It allows you to separate your content from your design – because you never know. You may want to display your content differently several years from now. Contentful takes an “API-first” approach.
10 Jekyll
Jekyll’s tagline is “transform your plain text into static web pages and blogs”. They take your raw text that is written in whatever form and turn it into beautiful web pages that you can host wherever you like.
Nowadays, there are a lot of website building platforms that offer lots of choices in terms of features and design. The only question is what exactly you need for your personal goals. There is something on this list for everyone, so dive right in and get started!