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20 Top Tools for Responsive Web Design

Posted on March 25, 2019 by Hosting

The post 20 Top Tools for Responsive Web Design appeared first on HostGator Blog . The main trend in web design that’s dominated the conversation over the past few years is responsive web design. As mobile use continues to grow around the world—recent estimates put the number of mobile devices in use at over five billion —the need for mobile-friendly websites is obvious. Responsive web design is the most popular solution to that need.   Why You Should Use Responsive Web Design Responsive web design is an approach to web design that ensures a website looks good on all devices. Responsive websites have the same information and page elements no matter what device you view them on, but the way the pages are organized changes according to the smaller screen size on smartphones and tablets.   As the name suggests, the website is designed to respond to the size of the screen each time it loads by changing the way the display appears to match the screen layout and provide an intuitive experience for every visitor. Responsive web design has become the go-to option for web designers who care about providing a good and consistent experience on all types of devices. Web designers do also have the option of building two separate websites: a mobile one that loads on smaller devices, and a desktop one that loads on computers. But with the growing number of device types and screen sizes of smartphones and tablets, that option poses the risk of still only working well in a fraction of cases. And if you’re providing different content or information to different visitors, you risk providing an inferior experience to some of your visitors. Why keep content you know is valuable for your desktop visitors inaccessible to your mobile ones? Responsive web design is good for your visitors, good for search engine optimization (SEO), and easier on you, since you only have to build and maintain one website. But if you’re new to web design, figuring out how to create a responsive website can seem overwhelming. Luckily, there are a number of tools to help with an adaptive design that make things easier. 20 Tools for Responsive Web Design The tools available for responsive web design fall into three main categories. For beginners wanting a simple option for building a responsive layout on their website, you have tools that will help you find and use responsive templates . For more experienced designers, there are a number of tools that aid in the responsive design process . Finally, for anyone that’s built a responsive website, there are responsive testing tools to help you make sure your finished website works well on all device types. Tools For Responsive Web Design Templates If you’re building a website and don’t know the first thing about web design or coding, but you know it’s important to have a responsive website, then you may be worrying about where to even start. Fortunately, as the importance of responsive web design has become increasingly clear over the years, a number of designers and web building tools have seen the need to develop responsive web design examples that newbie website owners can use to easily build a responsive website. Here are a few tools you can use to find responsive templates that will make creating a responsive website simple, even for those with limited web design skills. 1. Gator Website Builder Gator Website Builder has over 100 responsive website templates to choose from for an adaptive design. Anyone that subscribes to a Gator plan has access to the library of templates, as well as a intuitive website builder that makes it easy to customize the template you choose to create a unique, fully responsive website. 2. Simbla Simbla offers 100 simple responsive website templates customers can choose from to jumpstart the web design process. For anyone just looking to build a basic website with a few pages, their templates are straightforward and responsive. 3. Colorlib Colorlib is a resource that collects and highlights themes—both free and premium—that anyone building a website on WordPress can use. Some of the site’s blog posts specifically collect responsive themes and templates. While working with their themes will require a little more skill than using a website builder, they can provide a good starting point for building your website and can save you some money if you’re willing to commit the time to learning basic design skills. 4. ThemeForest ThemeForest , part of Envato, offers nearly 45,000 themes and templates for people building a website with WordPress, including over 5,000 that are responsive. Their themes start at around $5, but can cost over $100 for some options. Many of the themes include reviews and ratings from past customers, so you can get some advance insights into how well they work. 5. Templated Templated supplies nearly 900 responsive HTML templates that are freely available under the Creative Commons. Anyone can browse their collection and download and use any template that feels like a good fit for your needs. If you’re looking for a free option to get started with, this is a good place to look first. Tools For Doing Responsive Web Design Responsive templates are the best option for anyone with limited skills hoping to get a website up on their own. For designers with the skills to build a website from scratch, there are a number of tools for responsive web design that make doing the job well easier. 6. Bootstrap Bootstrap is a free, open source tool for building mobile-first responsive websites. Bootstrap provides a toolkit of the various elements you need to build a responsive website and lets you pick and choose the elements you want to include on your page to make prototyping intuitive. 7. Wirefy Wirefy is a free tool for easily creating responsive wireframes. The tool makes it easy to plan your design around your content and make sure it looks good across device types. It requires a working knowledge of HTML and CSS, but makes the work of building a responsive site easier. 8. FitVids If your website includes video, FitVids is a free, useful tool for ensuring your videos load at the right width on different devices. It’s a simple plugin that allows for fluid video embeds. Whatever screen size your visitors use, the videos will automatically load to the right width. 9. Adaptive Images What Fitvids does for videos, Adaptive Images does for images. The program detects a visitor’s screen size and automatically delivers the images on your page in the right size for them to look good on the screen and load quickly. 10. FitText FitText does for fonts what FitVids and Adaptive Images do for visual elements. It automatically resizes your headings and display text based on the size of the screen visitors have. FitText is a free and easy-to-use plugin. 11. Webflow Webflow is a tool to help people design and build responsive websites visually—it automatically generates the code for you, so you can stick to the visual side of design. The company offers a free basic plan you can use for designing a responsive site, and paid plans that come with additional features and services.   12. Invision Invision is a tool for enabling collaborative responsive design. It makes it easy to share your work with others on a team. And notably, it makes it easy to access it on various devices as you work, so you can test out how it looks on different screens as you go. Invision is free for one active prototype at a time, and has paid plans for those who need more. 13. Blueberry If you want to include an image slideshow on your website, the Blueberry image slider is designed to be automatically responsive. It’s a free open-source tool that automatically sizes all the images in your slideshow to fit on the screen of the device your visitors are on. All you have to do is load your images. 14. UXPin UXPin is a platform for web design and prototyping that prioritizes user experience. The platform enables quick and easy design and provides a library of pre-built components you can incorporate into your designs. It also makes collaboration with other designers on your team easy. UXPin is a subscription product that starts at $23 a month. 15. Style Tiles For professional designers that work with clients, Style Tiles is a useful tool for creating quick mock-ups of your design ideas for approval, before having to dive into serious design work. You can download free templates created by a designer familiar with the process of working with clients and knowledgeable about the importance of responsive web design.   Responsive Testing Tools One of the challenges inherent in responsive design is that, while your goal is to create a website that looks good on every possible device and in every different browser, you can’t reasonably test out every variation on your own. There are dozens of different screen and resolution sizes out there, and no person or business will have access to every one of them. While it’s worth it to try out your new responsive website on as many devices as you can access, you can go further by using responsive testing tools to see how your website works on additional screen sizes. 16. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test isn’t specifically for testing responsive websites, but Google has been upfront for some time about how important its algorithm considers mobile friendliness in websites in determining rankings. For any business that cares about SEO, Google’s tool lets you go straight to the source to confirm that your website is mobile friendly enough to meet the search engine’s standards. 17. Responsinator Responsinator is a free and handy responsive testing tool where you all you have to do is enter your URL, and you can see how your website looks on a few different device sizes and orientations. It’s a quick way to get a snapshot of how other visitors will see your website. 18. Browserstack While Responsinator lets you test your website on a few different device sizes at once, for businesses that want to really be confident that a responsive website works on every possible device, a more comprehensive solution is called for. Browserstack is a subscription product that automates the process of testing your website over 2,000 device and browser types.   19. Resizer Resizer is a free tool that provides a quick snapshot of how your website looks on the three main screen sizes, but also lets you test out how it looks at different widths on each device type. With a simple click, you can see how people with a variety screen or browser sizes will see the website, so you can get a much broader view of the different ways your responsive site will appear to visitors. 20. CrossBrowserTesting While a lot of how we talk about responsive design focuses on different device types and sizes, the way your website shows up in different browsers is another important consideration for user experience. The CrossBrowserTesting tool automates the process of testing out how your website looks and works in all the main browsers so you can spot potential issues before they affect how your visitors experience the website. Responsive Web Design Made Easy Building a responsive website doesn’t have to be hard. With the right tools for responsive design, you can pull together a website that meets your needs and provides an intuitive experience to all your users, no matter the device they come from. If you’re building your first website and don’t know where to start, the Gator Website Builder makes building a responsive website a fast and easy process. All you have to do is select your responsive template, and use the intuitive drag-and-drop editor to change the template to suit your particular vision. Even beginner website owners can have a working site up and ready within hours. And as an added benefit, Gator comes with HostGator’s powerful web hosting. Web hosting is a requirement for every website, so you can get two things done at once by signing up with one of the most respected web hosting providers in the space. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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Benefits of Using a Simple Website Builder

Posted on March 20, 2019 by Hosting

The post Benefits of Using a Simple Website Builder appeared first on HostGator Blog . One of the first things you learn when you start looking for a new website builder is that you have a lot of options. That’s generally a good thing—it means you get to be picky, right? But it makes finding the right one for you more complicated. Learning about lots of different features, add-ons, and extras included in different website builders can become a distraction from figuring out what you actually need. And of the many businesses offering website builders, most also offer multiple different website builder packages that all come with a different set of features and benefits. Navigating it all is pretty confusing, especially if you’re just starting to learn how to build a website . Your life may be easier if you avoid the more complicated options and focus on finding the best simple website builder that does what you need it to. 5 Reasons a Simple Website Builder Is a Smart Buy A website builder with lots of bells and whistles may sound appealing at first glance, but extras that sound cool aren’t actually worth much if you don’t need them (especially if you end up paying more for them). For many people, a website builder that sticks with the basics will be a better choice for a few main reasons. 1. It’s easier to learn. If you’re building a basic website, then you don’t need to be able to learn how to do a lot of complicated design work, you just need the ability to make your website look good and say what you need it to in a user-friendly interface. That doesn’t have to be hard. You can certainly create a simple website with a website builder that packs in a ton of functionality and complicated features, but you’ll be more likely to spend a lot of time trying to understand all the different features you’re paying for—whether or not they’re useful to you. That’s not the best way to spend your time or energy when creating a new website. A simple website builder will be easier to figure out, so you can start designing your site from day one of subscribing, and with fewer distractions. 2. You can make a website fast. No matter what your website goals are, the sooner your site is up, the sooner you’ll be able to achieve them. If you’re building a professional website for an online store, that means making money faster. If you’re creating a personal website to share your art or ideas with the world, getting it finished soon means you’ll start to reach people faster. With a simple  web designer and builder, you can feasibly build your small business website fast —in a matter of hours or less. If your needs are pretty basic, it could even take you less than an hour. But that’s only true if your website builder is easy to use and provides you with the tools to work quickly, such as good web design templates to start with and drag and drop functionality. 3. You’ll only be paying for what you use. For many people, this will be the biggest benefit of a simple website builder. More complicated features often come at a higher cost. There’s no reason to pay more every month for a website builder plan that includes a lot of features you’ll never use. Basic website builders that provide just the most essential features and functionality you need cost less. And since website builders bill on a subscription model, you won’t just be saving money upfront, you’ll be saving for years to come. If you want to stick with an affordable website builder , look for a simple website builder that just provides the most important features you need. 4. You can still create a beautiful website. This is one of the rare areas in life where paying less doesn’t necessarily mean settling for lower quality. As long as the website builder you choose provides well designed website templates and an intuitive website editor that allows you to easily change out colors and add original images, you can easily create a website that looks beautiful as well as being functional. A good builder will supply website templates that were designed by a skilled professional web designer. You get the benefit of their good eye and knowledge of website design best practices, without having to pay as much as you would to hire them directly. And simplicity can be one of the keys to beauty in a website. You want to avoid clutter or trying to do too much on each page. A simple website builder can help you work from a pre-designed, simple structure that will look good to your visitors. 5. Simple websites are intuitive. The more complicated websites get, the harder it is to design them in a way that’s intuitive. By keeping your website simple—something easier to do with a basic website builder—you’re ensuring that people will have an easy time finding what they need to. With just a few clear pages, people can quickly get to the page with the right information on it. And with a simple uncluttered web design, you more effectively draw their attention to the places on the page you most want them to notice, like your CTAs (calls to action). If you were out to build a website as complex as Amazon, a simple website builder wouldn’t do the trick. But you’re not. As long as you need a basic website that’s clear, attractive, and says all you need it to, you’ll be set with a simple website builder. Trying to make it more complicated—either the website itself or the process of building it—would make your life harder for no good reason. Who Should Stick with a Simple Website Builder For some businesses, those extra features that come with higher-cost website builder plans may actually come in handy. So there’s a chance you’re in a category of people who can benefit from a more complicated website builder. But there are three main types of people who will be better off sticking with a simple website builder: 1. People building personal websites If the goal of your website is to share your art, your thoughts, or your ideas with the world, then you don’t need a complicated website. You need a basic structure you can fill in with your own words or images. Making a personal website your own is easy once you get started, and there’s no reason to let the starting process get bogged down with unnecessary features and costs. 2. Bloggers Whether you’re starting a blog to give people you love updates on your day-to-day life, to offer advice to your readers, or to share your views on something you’re passionate about, a simple to-the-point website should be all you need. You won’t even need to make many changes to your template, and shouldn’t need to bother with creating a lot of different pages. A blog should be easy to build—sitting down to write regularly will be enough work. 3. Small business owners A small business can no longer get by without  developing an online presence through a business website. The internet is the main way people find new businesses they want to work with and the first place they look to confirm a business is legitimate. Your small business website will be the main face you’ll have for much of the world. A simple website builder can help small business owners get that website they need up fast. And by using a website builder that provides responsive design templates made for small businesses, you can ensure your website will adhere to web design best practices and work well on mobile (something essential for all business websites today). If you’re running an enterprise business that will have a lot of pages and traffic, or ecommerce websites with a wide variety of products, then you may need to go for a premium website builder plan that’s more flexible and allows more room to grow. But for anyone in these three categories, a simple website builder should provide all you need and make building your website easier.   How to Find the Best Simple Website Builder If you’ve decided a simple website builder is the best choice for you, you still need to find the right one. And there are a good number of basic and popular website builders on the market for you to consider. Here are a few good tips for finding the best simple website builder for your needs. 1. Figure out what you need. Think carefully about what your website will be and what you need to make that happen. Consider factors like: What the main goal of your website is How many pages you’ll have What the main goal of each page will be What your basic website structure will be—if your website will have a lot of pages, this should include thinking about the best categories and subcategories you should use to organize them all What kind of images you intend to include What types of media you hope to include—will you include any video, audio, or animation? What actions you want your visitors to take—will you be including contact information, comment functionality, social media sharing buttons, contact forms, an email list signup form, or the ability to accept payment methods from visitors? Having a general idea of what you want your website to look like and accomplish will put you in a better position to know what features you need to look for in a website builder. 2. Prioritize ease of use. Anyone that’s looking for a simple website builder will need something that’s easy to use and learn. Look for a website builder that offers an intuitive website editor that has drag and drop functionality and allows you to add elements and change colors on a page with a simple click of the mouse. 3. Focus on basic website builder plans (for now at least). The main website builder providers all offer different plans that provide different features and benefits. If you just need a simple website builder, then there’s a good chance you don’t need to spend a lot of time reviewing what’s available in the higher-cost premium plans at this point. You should pay the most attention to what’s offered with the basic plan for each provider you consider. That said, if you think there’s a chance your website will grow and evolve to need more advanced features over time, such as ecommerce functionality or unlimited bandwidth, then you may want to review the premium options now in order to understand what the website builder you choose offers at the higher levels and the cost you can expect from a future upgrade. 4. Look at the website builder’s educational resources. Ideally, you should be able to use your website builder without spending any time on training to learn how it works, but you’ll still be better off choosing a website builder that provides helpful resources on how the builder works so you can learn all the features available to you and gain some easy instructions if you want them. 5. Check reviews. One of the best ways to learn what to expect from a website builder before you buy is looking at what other people have to say about their experience with it. The internet makes it easy to find reviews from current and past customers who outline the things they love about a product, and the things they wish worked better. When you’ve narrowed down your website builder options to a main couple of plans, take a few minutes to read up on what users have to say about each. Customer reviews are a useful and reliable tie breaker that will help you better gauge factors like ease of use and the quality of a company’s customer service. Choose Your Simple Website Builder Finding the right website builder is a big decision, but it doesn’t have to be a difficult one. Make sure you understand what you need and want in a website builder and stick with a simple option that suits your priorities without making things too complicated. To start your search, check out HostGator’s simple website builder . Our basic, affordable plan provides all the essentials and is extremely easy to learn and get started with. And as an added bonus, it comes with free website hosting provided by one of the most respected companies in the industry. To learn more, our customer support team is available 24/7 to answer any questions you have regarding our web hosting and web builder plans. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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Creating a Website: How To Create a Beautiful Site

Posted on March 19, 2019 by Hosting

The post Creating a Website: How To Create a Beautiful Site appeared first on HostGator Blog . When creating a website, aesthetics aren’t everything – but they definitely matter. Have you ever visited a website that was cluttered, had colors that clashed, or a design that made it hard to read and navigate? Your response was probably to click away and go looking for another website to visit in its place. If you don’t know anything about web design, but you know it’s time to start that website you keep thinking about, you’re probably wondering to how to make a website that will both look good and accomplish your goals. For aspiring website owners that don’t know how to code and don’t have the budget to hire a designer (or would simply rather not spend that money), the best answer is to use an online website builder . Why Create a Website with a Website Builder? Website builders are a fast and easy way to get started with a new website or blog. And this is one case where taking the easy route doesn’t mean sacrificing quality. You can create a truly beautiful and effective website with the right website builder. Here are three benefits to using a website builder . 1. You can use website templates designed by professional designers. Any good website builder you consider will include a number of attractive templates that have been designed by skilled web designers. That means you get to take advantage of their skills without paying top dollar, like you would if you hired them on your own. In most cases, the designers that create templates for website builders will have knowledge of web design best practices and incorporate them into the templates they create. Even if you don’t have a good eye for visuals or website UX (user experience), you can trust that the people who created the template you start with do. By starting with a good template, it’s easy to build a website that looks beautiful and makes a good impression on your visitors. 2. You don’t have to learn how to code. Coding languages are complicated and intimidating to anyone that doesn’t already know them. And even some people who know how to code find it challenging. But you can skip over dealing with all that completely.   Choosing the best website builder for your business or site saves you from having to learn to code . And notably, it means you’ll also never have to deal with coding when making later updates. People that hire a designer to build their website will still have to struggle with HTML down the line when they need to make additions and changes. With a website builder, every future update will be simple.   3. You can make the website your own. The templates are a good starting point, but you don’t want your website to look just like all the other websites created from the template you chose. Don’t worry. You still have room to add your own style and make sure the end results look beautiful to you, while still being intuitive for your visitors. You can change out colors, add and remove different elements of the page, and move things around with simple drag-and-drop website builder functionality. Starting with a template provides a good shortcut, but from there it’s entirely up to you what you choose to do with it. How to Create a Website with a Website Builder If you’re sold on the idea of using a website builder, then it’s time to get started. These are the steps to building a beautiful website using a website builder. 1. Choose your website builder. First things first, you need to choose which website builder to go with. You have a number of options to choose from, and making the right choice now matters. Many website builders make it hard to keep your website if you move to a new product down the line. When looking for the best website builder for you, consider: Ease of use – You don’t want to spend hours learning how to use your new website builder, and you shouldn’t have to. Many website builders provide intuitive editing tools and resources to help you get familiar with the product right away. In particular, look for drag-and-drop functionality which makes editing easy for anyone, no matter the level of skill. Cost – Some drag-and-drop website builder options are free, but most that offer the kind of functionality you’ll need will cost somewhere in the range of $5 to $40 a month—and that’s an ongoing cost, you’ll be paying for as long as you keep your website up. Make sure you choose an affordable website builder you can pay for now and in the months and years to come. Mobile compatibility – Many of your visitors will be coming from mobile devices, so your website needs to look as good on a small screen as it does on a computer. Make sure your website builder provides easy options for making your website mobile friendly, such as responsive templates. Number of templates –  When you start from a template that comes pretty close to what you want your website to look like, the job of customizing it will be easier. The more options you have, the easier picking the right template will be. Media features – If you ever hope to include video or audio on your website, consider what options a website builder offers for adding them. SEO features – Search engine optimization (SEO) is an important tactic for making sure people are able to find your site. While there’s a lot to doing SEO effectively, a good starting point is having a website builder that offers SEO features that make on-site optimization easier. Image library – Finding good images is a big part of creating a website that looks great. A website builder that provides an image library can make the process much faster and easier whether that be for your small business or personal blog. Analytics – Easy access to website analytics will help you track the success of your website over time. Consider what analytics options your website builder offers. Figure out what your main priorities are in a website builder and find one that provides everything you need. 2. Select your favorite template. Creating a website with a website builder starts with a template. Look through the different options available to find one that’s a close match to what you have in mind for your site. Don’t just think about the one you like the look of the best—you can easily change a lot of the visual elements of the template you choose. Think about which one has the closest structure  and layout to the website you want to create. That will make bringing it in line with your unique vision easier. 3. Choose your color scheme. So much of creating a beautiful website as a business owner or blogger will depend on the colors you choose. You want to be consistent with the colors you use across the website—if someone clicks from a page that’s green and blue to one that’s red and black, it creates a confusing experience. And you want to make sure you stick with colors that look good together. Creating a color scheme as one of your first steps will help you achieve both those goals. You’ll know which colors to stick with for your backgrounds, fonts, images, and various page elements. If you don’t really know how to select colors that look good together, you can find a number of free resources online to help. Browse sites like Design Seeds and Color Hunt for inspiration. And the tool Coolers lets you pick a color you like, and see a wide variety of automatically generated color schemes that include it until you find one you like. All of these resources helpfully provide the color codes for each number, so you can easily find them in the editing tools of your website builder as you work. 4. Create a style guide for your site. As with your color scheme, creating a style guide for your website early on will help you make sure your style is consistent across the site and everything looks the way you want it to. This doesn’t have to be anything too long or complicated. It can be a basic list of notes on the stylistic choices you want to use on your site. Consider things like whether you want your elements and buttons to have rounded corners or sharp ones. Do you want all the pages on your website to maintain the same basic layout? What coloring do you want to use for backgrounds, text, links, and buttons? What font do you want to use, and if you want to use more than one, what contexts should you use each in? You can get some inspiration by looking at examples of other style guides , but yours can be much simpler than anything the big brands put together. It should simply serve as a guide you can revisit anytime you’re working on a new page and need a reminder of how to keep it stylistically in line with the rest of the site. 5. Define your website’s goals. While this part doesn’t have to do with making your website beautiful, it’s an important step in creating a website that’s effective. Everyone that creates a website has something they want to accomplish. In order to do so, you need to be strategic in creating a website designed to meet your goals. Spend some time clearly defining what those goals are. You’ll definitely have one overarching goal—for a business owner, that will be making new sales, for a personal website it could be connecting with people through blog posts ho care about the same things you do. In addition to that, you’ll likely have a number of smaller goals that contribute to your primary one: getting noticed by the right people, gaining traffic, and building an email list are a few possible examples. When you approach your website design with clear goals in mind, you’ll do a better job of making a website that’s in line with what you want it to be and do. And you’ll know how to track its success after it goes live. 6. Clarify your messaging. We’ve talked a lot about visual design so far, but the wording you choose will be just as important to accomplishing your goals as the visual aesthetic. The written content you include on your website (called copy in marketing parlance) has to do the heavy lifting of telling your visitors what the website is about and why they should care. You may find this easier if you take a little time to look at similar websites and see how they describe themselves. They can serve as inspiration to help you clarify your own messaging, while also making clear what’s already being done. Ideally, you want to differentiate yourself from other websites and communicate to visitors what makes yours unique. Write out your unique value proposition (UVP), a line or two that describes what your website has to offer and how it’s different from any other site. You can put the UVP directly on your website’s homepage, and it will also help guide you in the copy you create for the rest of the site. 7. Decide on your website’s pages and organization. Another important factor in keeping your website effective is making sure it’s intuitive. You don’t want to overload your visitors with too much information on one page—that’s both confusing and bad for SEO. So figure out how to divide everything you want to share into a number of pages that are each devoted to a manageable amount of information. When you have an idea of the different pages you’ll create, think about how to best organize them in a way that will make it easy for your visitors to find what they’re interested in. Figure out a few main categories your different pages fit into. These will probably be your main menu items. If your website will be fairly simple and only have a few pages, this step shouldn’t be too complicated. If you expect your website to grow into something much larger that has dozens or hundreds of pages, then it’s even more important to define a clear website architecture now that you’ll stick with moving forward.   8. Get to work creating your site. Now that you’ve done all the advance prep to figure out what you want your website to look like and say, pull up your template and start making the necessary changes. Make sure you stick with your style guide, color scheme, messaging, and organization plan as you work. It can be easy to get carried away with making changes that look good in isolation, especially when a personal or business website builder makes each little tweak so easy. But you did all the work in those steps for a reason and your website will be more user friendly, beautiful, and effective if you follow the guidelines you created for yourself. 9. Run it by someone else to get a second opinion. When you spend time working on a website, you get too close to it to see it the way someone else will. Before you push it out into the larger world, find a friend you trust to be a set of fresh eyes for you. They may be able to spot minor errors or let you know if the navigation is a little confusing. Listen to their feedback and make any changes they recommend that you trust will make the website better. Unleash Your Beautiful Website After all that work, your website is ready for a larger audience. Secure website hosting (if you haven’t already) and publish it to the web. Creating a website is exciting. Seeing something beautiful you created yourself (even if with the help of a solid template to start) is certain to instill pride and give you a sense of accomplishment. Now you can start reaching people with your message and working toward your goals. If you’re ready to sign up for a hosting service and create your own website, please contact HostGator today. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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Most Popular Content Management Systems

Posted on March 18, 2019 by Hosting

The post Most Popular Content Management Systems appeared first on HostGator Blog . When you’re in the early stages of creating a new website, you face an important choice: should you use a web content management system (CMS)? And if you do, which one? If you’re not familiar with what a content management system is, it’s a software tool that makes managing your web content much easier. It provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface you can use to create, edit, organize, and publish your content online, without having to work directly with a page’s code. And it helps you control the level of access different people have to your website, so you can bring in professionals to help with your site, without increasing the risk of someone changing the wrong thing. For most individuals making a website for their own purposes, or SMBs creating a fairly simple website to represent their businesses, a web content management system is a useful way to put easy website updates within reach for everyone that needs to make them. The three most popular web content management systems dominate the CMS market: WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. While these aren’t the only content management systems available, they’re as popular as they are for a reason, and most people on the lookout for a CMS for their new website won’t need to look any further than these three. What You Should Know About the Most Popular Content Management Systems While the three most popular CMSs have a lot in common, each offers distinct benefits. If you’re wondering how to best choose between them, here’s a rundown of the main information you need to know. CMS #1: WordPress WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world, currently powering over a quarter of the entire internet and claiming over half of the market share for content management systems. Because there are so many benefits of WordPress as a content management system , it is by far the most popular CMS today. WordPress is widely considered one of the easiest options for managing a website. And because of its vast popularity, the resources available for WordPress users are extensive.   To help avoid potential confusion, there are two versions of WordPress to be aware of: the WordPress hosting service (WordPress.com), and the content management system (WordPress.org). The former is a free and easy option for anyone starting a simple blog, but isn’t relevant for someone looking for a true CMS. This CMS is the better option for anyone serious about starting a WordPress business website , an ecommerce store, or any website you hope to potentially monetize or build a personal brand on. The Benefits of Choosing WordPress WordPress’s huge popularity has a lot to do with the main benefits it offers. It’s free. The WordPress CMS is open source, which means it’s free for users and you have a lot of freedom in how you use it. While the CMS itself is free, it doesn’t come with free web hosting or domain registration (one of the ways it differs from the WordPress.com blogging platform), so you will still need to invest in those to get your website running. And a lot of website owners will want more functionality that the most basic version of the CMS offers, which often requires an investment in plug-ins that have a cost. But even if you end up spending money on related expenses, the amount of functionality you get for free from WordPress is still impressive. It’s easy for beginners. The biggest differentiating factor between WordPress and the other two most popular content management systems is how easy it is for even the newest website creators to figure out. The interface is intuitive. You never have to mess directly with a page’s code to make updates (although the option to do so is there, and easy for coders to take advantage of when they want to). When you want to add new features and functionality to your website, WordPress plugins are easy to find and add, and most are designed to be similarly easy for beginners to use. And unlike the other two popular CMSs, with WordPress you can copy and paste content from Word while keeping it intact, which adds to day-to-day ease of use. You can find lots of resources and support. This is probably the biggest benefit of going with the CMS that has the most users. That huge community of users comes with a massive trove of resources to help you learn how to get the most out of WordPress. WordPress provides a library of educational materials to help you learn the basics, but the WordPress community goes much further than that in supplying supplementary resources. That includes a massive support forum where you can search all the past questions people have had about using WordPress. If the answer to a question you have isn’t there already, you can share it and get answers from one (or more) of the hundreds of experts in the community. In addition, there are many WordPress blogs thatare focused specifically on this specific CMS  when it comes to publishing tips, recommended themes and plugins, and suggested resources daily. You can choose from thousands of themes. When you’re building a website, the process is much easier if you can start from a design that gets the basic look and structure of your website into place. Anyone using WordPress can take advantage of that kind of design shortcut by using one of the thousands of available themes when getting starting. There are nearly 4,000 free WordPress themes , and that’s just the beginning. Third-party designers have created tens of thousands of additional themes you can buy, many of them for affordable prices. And many of the available themes are responsive, so you can easily build a website that works well on mobile devices, a necessity in 2019. Find a huge number of plugins and add-ons. Because of how popular the WordPress blogging platform is, a number of companies put resources toward developing plugins and other add-ons you can use to extend the functionality of the CMS and get your website working just how you want it to. The WordPress plugin library includes over 45,000 plugins that offer features such as enhanced security, spam blocking, SEO (search engine optimization) functionality, and much more.  Many popular WordPress plugins are free, and many of those that charge are low cost. Most website software and services are compatible with WordPress. When choosing your CMS, you want to make sure it will work seamlessly with any other tools you’ll be using for your website, such as your analytics, sales, or customer service software products. WordPress’s popularity ensures that every website service you can think of has good reason to make sure they’ll work well with the CMS giant, so the vast majority of products and services are compatible with WordPress. You can even find web hosting plans that are specifically optimized for WordPress websites, to make integration of your hosting and CMS easier. You can optimize for SEO. SEO is one of the most important components in making sure people can find your website. WordPress makes some basic aspects of optimizing your site for SEO easy, such as customizing your URLs. But you can also easily tap into more comprehensive SEO features with free SEO plugins such as Yoast and the All in One SEO Pack . Create an online store with WordPress and WooCommerce. On its own, WordPress doesn’t provide the main features you need to run an ecommerce store, but this is another need that’s easy to satisfy with plugins. In particular,   WooCommerce for an online store provides all the basic functionality you need in its free version, and offers advanced features like memberships and recurring subscriptions as paid add ons. Ready to get started with the WordPress CMS? Discover HostGator’s WordPress hosting options. Potential Downsides of Choosing WordPress No good service is entirely perfect, so WordPress does have some weaknesses to consider. It makes updates easy, but not initial design. With WordPress, adding new content and making updates to the pages you already have are easy for even the newest of beginners. But the initial design of a WordPress site still takes work. Finding the right template can help, but there’s still a good chance that you’ll need to hire a professional designer or invest in a website builder if you want to get your website looking just right without learning to code. WordPress has some limits on flexibility in comparison to other solutions. The tradeoff for ease of use is that WordPress isn’t quite as flexible or customizable as Joomla or Drupal . While the extensive selection of plugins gives you a lot of control over how your website looks and functions, you still don’t have quite as much freedom to do everything you want as you would with one of the other platforms. For the most part, individuals and SMBs aren’t likely to have any needs that hit up against these limitations. But big businesses and media companies that need more complex websites might. Some features require time to learn. As much as we emphasized ease of use, it’s worth noting that the more you want your website to do, the more complicated using WordPress can become. Doing all the basic tasks it’s designed for—creating, editing, scheduling, and publishing content—is pretty easy. But as you add more plugins and features to the website, you’ll face a larger learning curve in getting it all working and keeping it maintained. It’s vulnerable to hackers. While WordPress works hard to keep the CMS secure, its popularity makes it a target for hackers. WordPress itself, and many of the plug-ins designed to work with WordPress, often have vulnerabilities hackers can use to access users’ websites. That puts you at risk of someone taking over your website, or slipping malicious code into it that affects your visitors. You can reduce that risk by taking basic precautions, like keeping your plugins and WordPress version up to date, and investing in some additional security software, like our SiteLock website security scan . Frequent updates cause compatibility issues. WordPress releases frequent updates, which is mostly a good thing. New versions come with new features and patches to security vulnerabilities. But those updates sometimes cause compatibility issues with various plugins. That means your website could temporarily lose important functionality, or worse, it could bring your website down until you get it fixed. It’s often slower. WordPress websites tend to have some extraneous code that slows the site down in comparison to other CMSs. This is an issue with some themes more than others. And you can take a number of steps to improve your site’s speed and performance if it’s affected. CMS #2: Joomla Joomla is the second most popular content management system. It falls in the middle between WordPress and Drupal in terms of ease of use and how flexible and customizable it is. Like WordPress, it’s open source, so it’s free to use and allows you a lot of freedom in how you use the CMS to build your website. While its market share is smaller than WordPress’s, it still boasts over 2 million websites and has a sizeable community of volunteers who help keep the CMS working and improving. The Benefits of Choosing Joomla Joomla shares some of the benefits it offers with WordPress, but has a few unique ones as well. It’s free. Being open source, Joomla is completely free for anyone to download and set up. But also like WordPress, some of the templates and extensions you can choose to add new features to your website do come at a fee. And you will still need to invest in web hosting and a domain. It’s relatively easy to use. While Joomla is not as intuitive as WordPress is, it’s still easy enough for most beginners to figure out. But it requires more of a learning curve and you can expect to spend more time working on your website to get it where you want. That may be worth it, especially if you want more control over your website and consider that a higher priority than having a CMS that makes updates fast and easy. It provides a lot of flexibility. Joomla has a large library of extensions you can use to add functionality to your website. While the plugins you can use for WordPress similarly extend its functionality, Joomla is largely regarded as providing more flexibility and control to users that are willing to do a little more work to achieve what they want. It offers a lot of educational resources. While you may have to work harder to learn how to use Joomla, the CMS makes it easy with a large library of useful resources on getting started. They have a community blog, free video training classes, a community support forum, and even user groups that meet up in person in communities around the world. You have lots of Joomla templates to choose from. You won’t have as many options as with WordPress but even so, you can find thousands of themes for Joomla designed by professionals.  Some are free, and many others are affordable. It’s multilingual. One big selling point for websites with an international audience is that Joomla makes it easy to build out multilingual websites. They offer over 75 translation packs for languages from all over the world. If English isn’t your first language, or if part of your audience speaks a different language than you do, this is a valuable feature. It’s good for SEO. Like WordPress, Joomla offers a number of extensions that help users optimize websites for SEO.  Different extensions can help you update all the relevant meta tags, clean up your canonical links, and generate meta descriptions for your pages. It’s good for eCommerce. Joomla also has ecommerce extensions that provide the features you need to sell products through your website. Some of these are paid, but there are also free options like J2Store and Sellacious . It’s secure. Joomla is targeted by hackers less frequently than WordPress, but also has a smaller security team. On the whole, they’re probably a more secure option. And you can bolster your Joomla security with additional security extensions and by taking basic steps to protect yourself.   Ready to get started with the Joomla CMS? Discover HostGator’s Joomla hosting options. Potential Downsides of Choosing Joomla If you’re considering Joomla, you should be aware of some of the drawbacks. It’s harder to learn than WordPress. As already discussed, Joomla isn’t as intuitive for beginners as WordPress. Expect to spend more time learning the basics when getting started, as well as learning how to implement the different extensions and features you want to use. It’s still within reach for amateurs—you won’t have to hire or become a professional developer to figure it out. But it will take more time. It has fewer available add ons. While Joomla does have a large library of extensions, on the whole it has fewer modules and add ons than WordPress and Drupal. If you have specific features you want to implement that aren’t covered in their library and you don’t know how to build them out yourselves, you’ll end up with fewer options for extending the functionality of your website. They have a smaller community than WordPress, so fewer resources. The resources they have are definitely useful, but there’s less to work with than with WordPress because there are fewer people using Joomla and providing information on how to do so. As your needs get more specific, you may have more trouble finding the answers you seek. You may face compatibility issues. Just like WordPress, Joomla releases new versions periodically to add features and improve security vulnerabilities, and those updates can bring compatibility issues with the templates or extensions you use. In addition, sometimes different Joomla plugins will have compatibility issues with each other, so adding something new to your website can affect how another feature works. CMS #3: Drupal The third most popular content management system, Drupal , is distinct from the others in being more for professional developers than it is for beginners. And even for developers, learning how to use Drupal specifically can take time. But the extra work that goes into learning Drupal can pay off in the ability to make more complex websites that are better for enterprise businesses or companies wanting to include advanced features on their websites. That barrier to wide accessibility likely explains why it has a smaller share of the market, with a little less than 5% market share . But it’s still popular enough to make this list because it brings more power and flexibility to the table, making it a strong choice for certain types of websites. The Benefits of Choosing Drupal Drupal has a few distinct benefits that cause it to edge out the other options for some website owners. It offers more flexibility and customization options. Drupal’s broad API and extensive library of modules makes it more versatile than the other two CMSs. If you know what you’re doing, or hire someone that does, you can do just about anything you could want to with Drupal. While both WordPress and Joomla allow a lot of options for customizing your website, they still present some limitations that aren’t a problem with Drupal. It’s the most secure of the three. Drupal is the top choice for enterprise businesses and government entities in part because it has the best security record of the three. The content management system’s security team keeps a close watch on the CMS and provides frequent security updates to patch up any vulnerabilities found. While you have ways to make the other two platforms more secure, if security is a top priority for your website, Drupal delivers the best. It has a good community. While the Drupal community isn’t as large as that of the other two CMSs, it’s full of skilled developers committed to the platform. And that community includes large companies that are willing to spend money improving the platform their websites depend on. The Drupal community is therefore skilled, devoted, and supportive. It’s good for SEO. Like the other CMSs, Drupal has modules you can add that provide all the most important features you need to optimize your pages for the search engines. Add ons like SEO Checklist and Pathauto help users customize pages in all the right places for on-site optimization. It makes mobile-friendly websites easy. Drupal’s well designed for enabling mobile-friendly websites . All Drupal themes in the current version are responsive. And Drupal automatically resizes images according to the device visitors view them on. It’s more scalable. Drupal makes it easier to build out your website over time with more functionality, and has the power to handle more pages and a higher number of visitors. For companies that expect large growth in the coming years, it’s a smart CMS to start with so your website can grow with you. It’s a good platform for advanced features. Websites that will have advanced features like community platforms or forums can benefit from Drupal, which is well suited for more complex websites. For simple sites, it may be overkill. But for larger and more complicated website plans, the CMS delivers what’s needed. Ready to get started with the Drupal CMS? Discover HostGator’s Drupal hosting options. Potential Downsides of Choosing Drupal For certain websites, Drupal is a smart choice. But it’s not for everyone due to some significant drawbacks. It’s harder to use than WordPress and Joomla. This is the biggest reason not to use Drupal. If ease of use is more important than flexibility, as it is for thousands of website owners, then Drupal won’t be a good fit for you. Using Drupal often requires hiring professional help, which means that even though the CMS itself is free, using it can have a potentially high price tag. And developers skilled with Drupal aren’t as common as those that know WordPress or Joomla, so you could face a more difficult search when you need one. Updates cause compatibility issues. By now, this is a familiar problem. As with the other CMSs, a Drupal update can mean your website’s modules stop working correctly. You may be stuck waiting a while for the developers to update modules you depend on to get your website working right again. Using lots of modules can lead to compatibility issues. Modules are how you get the most out of Drupal, but the more you use, the more you risk them having issues with each other. Implementing the flexibility you desire can be harder if you have to figure out how to bring all your different modules in line with each other. Choosing a CMS for Your Website Each of the most popular content management systems have something to offer. Figuring out which one is the right choice for your website will depend on what you need, but you’re lucky to have a number of strong options that are free to use and come with a wealth of helpful resources to get started.Whichever CMS you choose, HostGator can support them all. Learn more about your web hosting options and get started building your site. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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The Top Mobile-Friendly WordPress Themes—and What Makes Them So Good

Posted on March 14, 2019 by Hosting

The post The Top Mobile-Friendly WordPress Themes—and What Makes Them So Good appeared first on HostGator Blog . When it comes to getting traffic, building an audience, and making sales, mobile is basically everything now. More than half the traffic on the web comes from mobile devices, Google now uses mobile-first search indexing, and the value of purchases made on smartphones and tablets this year will total $117 billion. If you plan to build a website , you need to choose a mobile-friendly WordPress theme from the thousands available. That can be a bit overwhelming. To narrow the field and get a better understanding of what makes a great mobile-friendly WordPress website theme, we looked at a few of the most popular ones— Astra ,  GeneratePress ,  Hestia , and  Sydney —to see why so many WordPress users choose them. What to Look for in a Mobile-Friendly WordPress Theme As you shop for a mobile-friendly theme for your WordPress website, keep an eye out for these key features.     1. Responsiveness is a must Whatever theme you choose must be responsive in order to display properly on mobile devices. That’s because a responsive template adjusts to the visitor’s device type by, for instance, changing from a two-column desktop layout to a single-column format for smartphones and resizing page elements to make them fit. This is a basic requirement for any mobile-friendly website . You can see how the Sydney theme adjusts from desktop to tablet to smartphone by reducing margins and, on phones, moving from three columns to one. However, responsiveness alone isn’t the only thing to look for in a mobile-friendly theme. Many other elements go into a truly mobile-friendly site design, and a good theme will support most or all of them.   2. Appearance matters for usability The best mobile site designs keep smartphone and tablet use conditions in mind. Think about how many times you’ve had to find a patch of shade to read something on your phone’s screen while you’re outdoors, or maybe you’ve had to adjust your device brightness or zoom in because the text was hard to read. Readable mobile design is clean web design , with uncluttered backgrounds, enough contrast between background and text for easy reading, and fonts that are large enough and simple enough (think sans serif, not script) for users to scan on a phone, even outdoors on a sunny day. Look for a customizer tool that will show you what your changes look like as you make the edits. Each of the themes mentioned in this post has a customizer utility and/or is compatible with Elementor, a popular free front-end page-builder plugin for WordPress that includes tools specifically for mobile design editing.   3. Google Fonts compatibility helps in several ways Astra and Sydney both support Google Fonts. This matters for typography options, because there are more than 800 font families in the Google Fonts directory. It also matters for your budget, because Google Fonts are free. And it matters for that all-important mobile page speed . Google uses caching and compression to deliver its fonts fast in the smallest files it can , so your typography won’t slow down your site and cause visitors to get impatient and leave.   4. Navigation is key to a good mobile user experience Good themes make it easy to get around your site on a mobile device with taps and touches, instead of relying on mouse and keyboard input. They also have a relatively flat site architecture with as few sub-levels as possible so visitors can go from your homepage to whatever product or post they’re looking for in as few taps as possible. Hestia and Sydney offer the simplest design approach, with a single-page site layout for mobile. That means visitors can find what they want without having to navigate between pages. Great mobile-friendly themes also include features that encourage visitors to stick around and interact more with your site. For example, Astra’s Pro version makes it easy for shoppers to find what they want in a WooCommerce store —sales bubbles, dropdown cart, and quickview tools all reduce your visitors’ need to move from one screen to another as they gather information and shop.   5. Performance is critical for search results and user experience Google says 53% of mobile users will bounce if a site takes longer than three seconds to load, but the a  average mobile site load time is an agonizingly long 15 seconds. So even the most elegant, simple mobile theme has to be fast and lean to be worth using. Bigger files take longer to load, which is why the best themes proudly proclaim how few resources they need. GeneratePress takes up less than 30KB with a default WordPress installation, while Astra uses less than 50KB and loads in half of one second. Both of these themes use Vanilla Javascript rather than jQuery to avoid render-blocking issues that slow down load times.   6. SEO friendliness helps your site get found Google’s moving to a mobile-first index for search results, but having any old mobile site isn’t good enough. The best themes for mobile are designed with SEO in mind and make it as easy as possible for search engine crawlers to find their way around. Hestia has an SEO-friendly structure, while GeneratePress and Astra have built in the schema.org structure that’s required for rich snippets to display in search results . All three of these themes as well as Sydney follow best practices for coding, which also helps with SEO.   7. WooCommerce compatibility helps you optimize your store WooCommerce is one of the most popular plugins for WordPress , and most popular themes are designed to be WooCommerce0compatible. Mobile-friendliness is crucial for online stores now because, by the end of 2018, half of all online orders will come from mobile devices , and more than 60% of all e-commerce traffic already comes from phones and tablets. Creating a mobile-friendly shopping experience for your customers can reduce cart abandonment , increase revenue, and encourage customers to keep coming back to your store. The Pro version of the Astra theme includes a WooCommerce module with grid view, gallery, and infinite scrolling options for your product catalog. Hestia and GeneratePress are also WooCommerce compatible.   Choosing Your Mobile-Friendly WordPress Theme As you’re searching for your ideal mobile-optimized WordPress theme, ask yourself how each one you look at stacks up in each of these areas. Take your time, read user reviews, explore each theme’s demos, and download a few and try them out before you make your decision. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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