(recorded January 5, 2021) - 1 hour, 45 minutes
We break down the building blocks of Wix, Shopify, Squarespace, GoDaddy, WordPress, and GlitterPaw
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REDESIGNING FROM SCRATCH: If you like the platform you are using, then don't redesign the website from scratch. You have no way of knowing if your new design will convert as well as your old design. Of course if your old design isn't converting at all, then sure, go ahead and start over.
When you are staying on the same platform, the better idea is to change one page at a time and test it using Google Optimize, Crazy Egg, or HotJar to test the results of the page design changes. Once you see the results of the testing, you can apply the new design to the entire site.
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WIX
A. You maintain ownership of your website content, but they can use your website for their advertising.
B. They are a software-as-a-service hosting platform. You can cancel your subscription at any time, but doing so also means you are losing your website.
C. You cannot download your data.
D. Expansion: They have a lot of features built-in, but beyond the built-in features they only have about 200 add-on apps that are available. Most of their apps focus on making your website better as a whole.
E. Ease of use: Pretty easy because it's a WYSIWYG editor.
F. Setup: They provide a lot of creative freedom, which can be confusing and time consuming. They also force you to manage your desktop and mobile site differently, which means it will take extra time to set your site up and then continually manage it. Launch your website when you finish adding your information and products. That takes as long as it takes for you to get it done.
G. Design: They have templates based on different industries, and then customize them from there. You can also choose a blank design and create your own site.
H. Marketing: You have to pay extra for analytics and to use marketing features. There's 3rd party integration for additional marketing.
I. Reason to use: Online footprint, content marketing, ecommerce
J. Scalability: The site will get difficult to manage as you grow the site with many pages and products. Start small and grow to a about 1,000 items.
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SHOPIFY
A. You maintain ownership of your website content, but they can use your website for their advertising.
B.They are a software-as-a-service hosting platform. You can cancel your subscription at any time, but doing so also means you are losing your website.
C. You can download your data and backup your theme.
D. Expansion: More than 5,000 available Apps to add plenty of extra ecommerce features to your site. Most of their apps focus on cool features to engage shoppers and convince them to buy more.
E. Ease of use: Perhaps this is a medium difficulty use site. The back end doesn't show you what your site looks like, but the interface is usable for most of the tasks you need to perform on a daily basis while other things are not very intuitive to find.
F. Setup: It will take a few more hours to get used to their back office setup than it would for others, but you won't really get frustrated by it. They will automatically reorganize your website to work on desktop and mobile so you don't need to worry about it. You can use one of 10 built-in free themes, but you will have a learning curve to getting it to look like you want. Launch your website when you finish adding your information and products. That takes as long as it takes for you to get it done.
G. Design: They have built in designs, but you can hire a Shopify developer to customize the entire look of Shopify. Most people don't have their designs customized, which means there are now millions of websites that all look the same.
H. Marketing: Built-in analytics. You have to use extra apps for every type of marketing feature you might want or every outside marketing platform you want to connect to. Shopify is not a good platform for content marketing because it doesn't have an easy way to add unlimited pages of text for blogging or other content building ideas.
I. Reason to use: Ecommerce, POS, omnichannel
J. Scalability: Plenty of international options and bulk product editing features to manage a large product database. Their multi-language features are clunky and very expensive. Start small and grow to any size.
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SQUARESPACE
A. You maintain ownership of your website content, but they can use your website for their advertising.
B. They are a software-as-a-service hosting platform. You can cancel your subscription at any time, but doing so also means you are losing your website.
C. Very limited ability to export or backup your data.
D. Expansion: Limited to a small set of Extensions and features that they provide. They do have a developer mode that allows you to customize some things, but it's still limited.
E. Ease of use: Pretty easy because it's a WYSIWYG editor.
F. Setup: They will automatically reorganize the content of your website to fit to a mobile device. Launch your website when you finish adding your information and products. That takes as long as it takes for you to get it done.
G. Design: They have templates that you can also customize.
H. Marketing: They have some marketing features built-in.
I. Reason to use: Online footprint, content marketing, ecommerce
J. Scalability: The site will get difficult to manage as you grow the site with many pages and products. Start small and grow to a site with maybe 1,000 items at most.
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GODADDY
A. You maintain ownership of your website content, but they can use your website for their advertising.
B. They are a software-as-a-service hosting platform. You can cancel your subscription at any time, but doing so also means you are losing your website.
C. You cannot download your data
D. Expansion: There is no room to expand beyond the feature they provide.
E. Ease of use: Pretty easy because it's a WYSIWYG editor.
F. Setup: Easiest website system to set up. Create an account and choose the industry you are in and their system will create a website based on your industry according to the template you choose. They will automatically reorganize your website to work on a mobile device, but you need to look at how they do that because it doesn't always look good. You just need to add your text. Launch your website when you finish adding your information and products.
G. Design: Very restricted to what your site will look like and the fonts you can use
H. Marketing: I don't view GoDaddy as a serious website platform if you are really interested in active online marketing. They are good as a starter website that you will tell people about, but beyond setting it up as an online presence, I don't see how you can make this work.
I. Reason to use: Online footprint
J. Scalability: This is not a system you can scale. Even a site with 15 pages on it will be difficult to maintain. No real room for growth.
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WORDPRESS
A. You will maintain ownership of your website.
B. You can move it to any hosting provider at any time.
C. You can download and keep a copy of all your data and all the code of your website.
D. Expansion: You can do anything with more than 57,000 plug-ins and if you hire a developer to create something completely unique for you.
E. Ease of use: Not as easy as competitors because the back end area doesn't show you what the site looks like, you have to keep previewing your changes. The back end quickly becomes very confusing because features of your site get hidden inside of each extra plug-in that you add. For example, instead of having one screen to go to when you need to edit all your SEO features, you have to jump around to different plug-ins because there is no single plug-in that manages every SEO attribute.
F. Setup: Quite horrible. With WordPress you are not just setting up a website, you have to figure out your hosting plan, install the WordPress system, install the theme, customize the theme, learn their interface, and then suffer from paralysis as you try to figure out which of 57,000 plug-ins are the ones you need. The back end interface is so confusing that you are likely to forget where features are, which is especially frustrating if you only need to touch them once a year and then can't remember where they were to edit again.
G. Design: You have complete design control over anything you want to do, but you're going to need a developer to help you with it.
H. Marketing: You can do anything, but you are probably going to need a developer to help you set it up.
I. Reason to use: Anything you can think of, omnichannel if you can figure out how to connect your site to your POS.
J. Scalability: Plenty of add-ons for scalability and the site will work however you want. However, once your site starts to scale, you will find that the back end is both a blessing and a curse because of how it forces you to view and manage pages. Start small and grow to any size, but if you are investing the money into Wordpress you should be thinking in a large scale to begin with.
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GLITTERPAW
A. We do have a clause in our contracts that grants us permission to use your website as an example when soliciting new clients or showcasing our work. This is a standard clause in contracts from all the web design companies I know.
B. We are a software-as-a-service hosting platform. You can cancel your subscription at any time, but doing so also means you are losing your website.
C. You can download a copy of all your data.
D. Expansion: As the developer of our own platform, we've already built-in hundreds of commonly used apps into GlitterPaw. Since 2003 we've focused on adding new apps as soon as we recognized that the retail jeweler would benefit from them. On rare occasions a jeweler will request an app that we had not thought of yet, in which case we add it. On other occasions a jeweler will request something unique, which is also not a problem for us since we are the primary developers. Those unique requests are no different than if you were to hire a developer to add extra features to your Wordpress site.
E. Ease of use: Not as easy as competitors because the back end area doesn't show you what the site looks like, you have to keep previewing your changes. As a proprietary system, all the features you need to change for any given reason are collected in one location. The back end is also designed for speed and simplicity so that you can even edit your site from a mobile device.
F. Setup: We can set up a site in less than a week, after that we guide you through giving us the content, or we write the content for you, or we source the content for you.
G. Design: Although we have 35 built-in designs, we offer the full flexibility to design anything to your liking. We provide a lot of guidance in this area, and most of the time we strongly suggest a design based on what your goals are.
H. Marketing: Many built-in features that you would usually have to pay extra for with all other platforms
I. Reason to use: Online footprint, online marketing of all types, ecommerce, POS, omnichannel, and if you're a jeweler. GlitterPaw has all the features in place for jewelers so they can improve their conversion and become a serious online seller while never losing sight of what is needed to continually promote the local brick-and-mortar store.
J. Scalability: We've tested the system with up to 77,000 products and 2,000 web pages. The way pages are displayed is unique and easy to understand. It's also easy to manage more than 1,000 blog posts without them getting difficult to find or edit. Multi-language ability is built in as well as options for international shipping and checkout.