Websites these days must be mobile friendly, give your customers an enjoyable experience, and convert visitors into leads. Plus if your business is based in Dubai, you know we always want the best of the best. In this article, we’ll walk you through which platforms are popular in the web design industry and help you choose the best web design platform to give your business a competitive edge depending in your industry.

Firstly, why should you build your website on a web design platform?

• Ease of Use: most modern web platforms are no-code platforms which means that websites can be built on them without a requirement for writing code. This makes these platforms easy to use and will help ensure your website project is completed on time.

• Affordability: Because web platforms require very little coding or no code at all, developers are able to complete projects on them quicker which reduces the cost of developing the project for clients.

• Professional UI/UX: Most web platforms have design templates built to enhance user interface and experience which makes the final output more engaging and can help drive call-to-actions on your website.

Now that we understand the benefits of using a web design platform for your projects, let’s explore the key features you need to look out for when selecting a web design platform for your project. You do not have to do this by yourself, you can work with your web design agency to identify the best platform to use for your project based on the specific use case for your business and its relevance to your industry.

Some of the key features to look out for include:

• Ease of Use: User experience is a very important criteria to consider. You want your website built on a platform that is easy to use. Ideally, you want to be able to make basic updates on your website with a simple tutorial from your developer. Updates like adding product and service descriptions, changing images or adding products if it’s an eCommerce store are some of the basic updates you should be able to make by yourself.
• Cost Effective: Some web design platforms are free while others require monthly or annual subscriptions. Before making a decision on using one, you should strike a good balance between the cost and the features each platform offers in relation to the type of website you want to build
• Scalability: As your business grows, increased traffic will put an additional load on your website. You want to be sure that your website is built on a platform that is scalable and adaptable to heavy traffic as more users subscribe to your offering.
• Security: This is a crucial factor in making a decision on the web design platform to use for your project. Online scam is ubiquitous and bad actors in the space are constantly looking for vulnerabilities on websites to steal vital information from websites. This is especially very important if your website collects and stores the personal information of your users or customers. For this reason, it is important to ensure that the platform you choose has a robust security architecture and supports other 3rd party security features you might need to integrate on the website to further protect your user base.

Select the Best Web Design Platform:

Let’s take a look at some of the most popularly used web design platforms you should consider for your project

• WordPress: is one of the most popular web design platforms available today. It is a free and open source content management system that includes features for plugins and templates which you can customize for your project. It is estimated that between 34% – 45% of all websites today are built on WordPress.

• Wix: is a website builder with paid subscriptions for building personal as well as websites with advanced features and enterprise website development. A lot of small business websites are built on wix as it has a user friendly interface and the subscriptions are affordable.

• Squarespace: is a website building and hosting platform. They offer flat subscriptions that give you access to templates, site management tools and plugins. It is ideal for creating professional creative websites.

• Shopify: is one of the most popular web design platforms for creating ecommerce stores. They have a lot of plugins to manage onlines stores from inventory management tools to payment solutions and more.

• Weebly: offers free website builder for creating websites, blogs and ecommerce stores. It has an easy-to-use interface with lots of drag-and-drop features to help you quickly build a website.

• Webflow: is gaining popularity as a no-code website builder with lots of visual engaging interfaces for designing your website. It is very popular amongst freelancers and agencies as designers and marketing professionals tend to use it alot.

• Volusion: is an ecommerce website builder and online selling platform. They offer an all-in-one ecommerce software to help small and large organizations set up and manage their ecommerce stores.

The pros and cons and pricing of each of these platforms are summarized below:

Web Design Platform	Pros	Cons	Price (USD)
WordPress	●     Ease of use ●     Flexibility ●     Huge online community ●     Large theme library ●     SEO ready	●     Prone to attack ●     Performance issues ●     Frequent updates	Free
Wix	●     Good site speed ●     Easy drag-and-drop interface ●     Live editing feature	●     Template cannot be switched ●     Hard to migrate data ●     Limited SEO features	$4-5 – 35 per month
Squarespace	●     Advanced blogging features ●     Mobile apps feature ●     Extensite page limit	●     Ease of use ●     Limited page speed ●     Limited marketing tools	$16 – $49 per month
Shopify	●     Ease of Use ●     Good Customer Support ●     Multiple payment processors ●     Lots of store themes ●     Lots of Apps and plugins	●     Limited customization ●     Migration challenges ●     No email hosting	$24 – $299 per month
Weebly	●     Good site speed ●     Mobile app features ●     Site migration ●     Analytics	●     Limited blogging tools ●     Photo editing issues ●     Limited support	$0 – $38 per month
Webflow	●     Intuitive Editor ●     Publish straight to the web ●     Code Editor ●     Great performance	●     Limited Code customization ●     Ease of use ●     Limited support	$14 – $212 per month
Volusion	●     Multiple payment solutions ●     Good Customer support	●     Weak Blogging feature ●     Ease of use	$35 – £299 per month

We have covered quite a couple of the commonly used website platforms to help bring your project to live. Of course, there are so many more out there. To select the best one for your business, they should offer the following as a minimum;

• the best web design platforms are the ones that are easy to use
• the best web design platforms are the ones that will help you create a great looking website
• the best web design platforms are the ones that will help you reach your target audience

Conclusion:

With guidance from your web design agency, you should be able to select one of the many web design platforms out there that meets the use case for your business and will enable you to build a responsive and secure website with optimal UI/UX to get your business online in no time.

Unless you are building a very complex project with layers of complexity, there is no reason to build websites and web applications from scratch these days given the disadvantages in terms of cost, time to market, and high chances of bugs that come with custom development. You should be able to find a suitable web platform for your project.

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